


















































































































































































































































































































































































































































V 




PRESENTED m 


































































I 


































































EIGHT LECTURES 


BY 


Rev. DUDLEY WARD RHODES, 

i i 


Rector of the Church of Our Saviour, 


MOU1TT ATJBUR1T, CIZhTCIIIfcTItT.A.TI. 


“ YE CANNOT SERVE GOD AND MAMMON 


’-*- 

} > 

3 ) 

3 > 

) ) > 

>3 


) 


CINCINNATI: 

Peter G. Thomson, Publisher, 

179 Vine Street. 

187.9. 


U^U| % 
















HN&4- 

. 74 . 5 ' . 

c °py?c 


COPYRIGHT, 

1879, 

PETER G. THOMSON. 


- Q£XjU.J &L>1 

^* 1 .* v 


DEDICATION 




I LAY THI8 LITTLE BOOK AT THE FEET OF MY MOTHER WITH 
AN HUMBLE AND REVERENT LOVE. NO HONOR THAT MEN CAN GIVE 
IT, CAN EQUAL THAT WITH WHICH I CROWN IT BY PUTTING HER NAME 
THUS UPON ITS FOREHEAD. 




■n 


INTRODUCTION. 


T HESE lectures now offered to the public were delivered 
during the regular winter’s work of 1878-79. They 
were suggested by the things which I saw and heard in 
mingling with many men of many thoughts. Believing 
that the pulpit has a mighty work to do in pointing out the 
rough spots over which so many fellow mortals struggle 
through all their bitter life, that it has a mighty work to do 
in rebuking vice, not only in its generic forms, but in its 
specific manifestations, that its grandest success to-day would 
be in making all men know that Christianity is something 
far more than a bundle of dogmas or a logical system, that 
it is a living power, a life itself, I wrote these lectures to 
awaken the consciences of professing Christians to a sense of 
their responsibility to their fellow men and their God. Any¬ 
one who has read much of the history of preaching, cannot 
but be struck with astonishment and with regret at the tre¬ 
mendous change in the matter and manner of preaching 
from the days of Latimer and Fisher to those of Porteus. 
The intense fire, the personal application, the nervous di¬ 
rectness, the splendid consciousness of a divine message 
which make Latimer’s sermons as powerful now as they ever 
were, are illy compensated by the eloquent language, the 
polished rhetoric, the splendid arguments of later divines. 
The greatest blow ever struck at the influence of the pulpit, 
was not from the hands of its enemies. It was struck by 



VI 


INTRODUCTION. 


one who held its highest honors, when Tillotson taught 
men to read sermons instead of preaching them. 

The work which he and the other great divines of the 
eighteenth century did by their contributions to systematic 
theology was great, was marvellous. Their sermons will 
stand forever among the irrefragable evidences of Christi¬ 
anity. But in our day, and especially in our country, the 
urgent demand is upon us to throw away the methods of 
two centuries ago, and speak to men face to face, soul to 
soul, upon the very fundamentals of righteousness, sober¬ 
ness, and judgment to come. The church cannot stand 
upon fine essays on Evolution and Protoplasm, she cannot 
draw worshippers to long and elaborate arguments on Resur¬ 
rection and Predestination. But she can make herself a 
vital power by making all men know how deeply she sym¬ 
pathizes with the suffering, and how much she shrinks from 
every form of dishonesty and malice and corruption, and by 
pleading with them and for them as a mother pleads for her 
son. One bad Christian makes more infidels than a dozen 
syllogisms. Impressed with these thoughts, I prepared these 
lectures on especial forms of misery and crime, and delivered 
them with the firm conviction that there is a legitimate and 
binding demand on the pulpit to call attention to great 
social disorders and official frauds and mercantile dishonesty, 
so long as it is notorious that Christian men are implicated 
in them. What I have said, may in some instances seem 
harsh, but one must strike hard to make any impression, and 
I am glad to know that in no case have I ever been accused 
of distorting or exaggerating the facts on which the lectures 
were based. 

Those facts were gathered by patient, personal investiga¬ 
tion, and were tested by every possible means. If the 
number of letters received by the author in any way evinces 


INTRODUCTION. 


Vll 


the public appreciation of his work, it is certain the teaching 
in them has not been in vain. 

This introduction, hardly necessary at all, cannot be 
closed without an expression of thanks for the great assist¬ 
ance afforded by the Health Officer, Dr. Minor; by the 
Auditor, Mr. Capellar; by the Grocers’ Exchange; Con¬ 
solidated Railroad officers; City Solicitor, Mr. Bates; the 
Police Judge, Wilson, and by many other gentlemen of in¬ 
fluence and information. 

Whatever has been said has been without malice and 
with no other motive than to advance the cause of Christ 
and humanity. The lectures are published exactly as they 
were delivered. 

Rectory, Church of Our Saviour, 

Alt. Auburn , September 9, 1879. 


CONTENTS. 


——— 

Page. 

I. The Story of the Tradesmens’ 

Books, i 

II. Food Corrupters, . . 23 

III. The Story of the Auditor’s 

Books, .... 45 

IV. Street Car Life in Cincinnati, 66 

V. The Betrayal of a City, . 91 

VI. The Curse of Tenement Houses, i 16 
VII. Church and Theater, . 142 

VIII. Common Sense in Funerals, 161 



THE STORY 


—OF— 0 . 

The Tradesmen’s Books. 


There is probably no one problem which is so 
troublesome to many people as that one which 
Thackeray undertook to solve—how to live 
handsomely on nothing a year. The man who 
has no income, nor any prospect of any, must 
live by his wit and by the absence of it in others. 
He must eat, he won’t work, he can’t dig, and 
his life becomes one long foraging campaign, a 
constant struggle to secure enough credit for 
the day’s wants. The last ten years have shown 
the colossal’proportions of our social shams. 
They have demonstrated how possible it is to be 
strong and rich in appearance, and weak and 
poverty-stricken in reality. Great commercial 
houses, seemingly built on a rock, have been 
blown over by a breeze and found to be rotten 
through and through. Men whose credit en¬ 
abled them, to borrow millions, are found out, 
and known to have been so moneyless that they 



2 


LECTURES. 


had to borrow the revenue stamp which the 
transaction required. We have lived in a high¬ 
ly inflated age, when every one has been strain¬ 
ing every nerve to keep up old positions with 
reduced incomes, and the result has necessarily 
been to increase fraud and bring in a deluge of 
insincerity and thievery. 

A man who, five years ago, had an income of 
$4,000, and lived at that rate, now, has $2,000, 
and is not willing to reduce his expenses and his 
style of living. He can’t stretch his income, so 
he supplements it by a temporary use of funds 
in his hands, by a speculation with trust funds, 
by some ingenious mortgage subterfuge, or by 
a system of small debts. 

I have nothing to do just at this time with any 
of these especial forms of dishonesty, except the 
last. I am to bring before you some facts as to 
the way in which respectable people, church 
members as well as others, manage to get along 
by a system of petty pilfering, using their family 
name and position to empty the shelves of the 
groceries without materially increasing the 
money in the till. I have no doubt that there 
will be some good people who will be shocked 
that the pulpit should be degraded as they say 
to a merely moral engine, and that a discourse 


THE TRADESMENS’ BOOKS. 


3 


on such a duty as paying grocers’ bills should 
take up the time of a sermon, but I am getting 
more of the opinion every day that a little mor¬ 
ality all by itself is not going to hurt the religion 
which the pulpit preaches at other times. After 
the lecture of two weeks ago, to-night, on Street 
Car Life, I understand some one said it was very 
good, but that there wasn’t a word of God or 
Christ in it. Well, there wasn’t much of either 
in the subject. But I still think there was a vast 
amount of the spirit of God and of Christ in the 
lecture, whether the names occurred there or 
not. So long as people estimate a sermon by 
the number of holy words which it contains, 
and not by the spirit and purpose and effect of 
it, the pulpit will be kept down to a mere dron¬ 
ing of Pater Nosters, or rehearsal of the sacred 
genealogies. Undoubtedly the great purpose of 
the pulpit is to preach redemption through 
Christ, to save men from their sins, and to 
fit them for another life. But what is to be 
done if after preaching these great truths, 
Sunday after Sunday, year after year, it becomes 
apparent that many men think themselves re¬ 
deemed and fitted for another life, and yet 
haven’t got enough grace to live an honest life 
and pay an honest debt ? 


A 


LECTURES. 


What is the use of urging men to pay God 
what they owe Him, while they are constantly 
owing more and more to trades-people whom 
they hardly expect to pay ? Let us take a new 
start. Begin again. Bring God and Christ into 
the pages of our tradesmen’s pass books, and see 
how much better Christians we can be when we 
have a pigeon-hole full of receipted bills. There 
is a great deal more Gospel in a receipt than 
some people think. It at least is the evidence 
of a religion which is based on a pure morality 
and the Golden Rule, and that kind of evidence 
which carries conviction most rapidly to the 
world outside the church. 

Now, what are the facts on this subject ? 
What particular story do the tradesmen’s books 
tell? 

i. That there is a very large class of people 
who go from store to store defrauding each in 
turn, and staying at each just as long as they 
can obtain credit. It is a stupendous revelation 
that is made by a couple of hours’ study of the 
suspended accounts at the Grocers’ Exchange. 
The accounts owing are not so remarkable as 
the number of places where some of the debtors 
owe them. Sit down before the great folio 
where these accounts are, and as you turn page 


THE TRADESMENS’ BOOKS. 


5 


after page you will see some pictures of human¬ 
ity. It is a rare collection. Take some one 
name out of the ten thousand that are there, and 
just run down the page, and you will find it so 
often that it would seem the man had nothing 
to do but open accounts and forget to close them. 
Like the provident bee he passed from flower to 
flower and gathered some honey everywhere. 
As there are thirteen hundred groceries in the 
city, a man of fair appearance and good address 
may make a pretty extensive account before he 
is entirely without credit. And then the amount 
accumulates so slowly, by such small sums, that 
there is no perceptible break between an insig¬ 
nificant bill and a large one. Every day there 
are promises to pay, and the grocer who is 
anxious to get what is due him doesn’t care to 
refuse a little more, and after all, the man may be 
a good customer, and mustn’t be thrown away, 
and so the account swells until there is a per¬ 
emptory demand, an indignant and majestic 
reply from the customer, that “he won’t deal 
with a man who can’t trust him,” the customer 
hunts up another grocery, and his unpaid bill is 
posted upon the suspended account, and isn’t 
lonely very long, because a whole troop of 
brothers and sisters soon join it from different 


6 


LECTURES. 


parts of the city. There are large and expensive 
families of bills there, of all ages and sizes, 
recognizing the same parent, who, however, 
never sees them and is entirely neglectful of 
them. There is no room to doubt that these 
people, most of them, intended to defraud their 
dealers. Nothing is credited to them at any 
place, and a new account is opened just as an 
old one is suspended. 

Before the formation of the Exchange, the 
grocers were almost helpless. They had no 
means of determining the character of an appli¬ 
cant for credit. Of course they might inquire 
as to his means, but they couldn’t know what 
was far more important, his willingness to pay. 
But when they found how large a number they 
were mutually supporting, they combined against 
the spoilers and instituted a central Exchange 
where the suspended accounts of all were kept, 
and when any man asked for credit from any 
house in the association, the list was inspected, 
and if his name occurred in it, he was blandly 
refused credit until he had paid former accounts. 
This has, of course, prevented a considerable 
amount of chicanery, but still the list grows, 
because it is constantly receiving the names of 
men whose credit has heretofore been good. 


THE TRADESMENS’ BOOKS. 


7 


2. The second consideration from this list 
arises from the class of people whose names are 
found there. These are not the poor and laboring 
classes exclusively, nor mostly. The mind that 
joins debt with poverty is not in correct work¬ 
ing order. The men who earn $2 a day are 
generally the ones who pay their bills and whose 
names are not found on the Index Expurgatorius 
at the exchange. While we find some police¬ 
men, mechanics and laborers, they are not the 
principal ones, nor the heaviest debtors, nor the 
most diffused debtors if I may use that word. 
It is the better class of society, lawyers, doctors, 
bankers, editors, business men, legislators and 
people of wealth and pecuniary ability, who 
make up the bulk of indebtedness. They are peo¬ 
ple who are living well, and holding positions 
in society, and dressing handsomely, and giving 
entertainments, and buying season tickets to the 
opera, and putting their names on subscription 
papers for some aesthetic or reformatory scheme. 
They are people around whose doors carriages 
gather in the evening, bringing guests to enjoy 
their lavish hospitality. They are people from 
whose door the same guests go away telling of 
the splendor and luxury there. Now, if those 
guests only knew it, that entertainment was fur- 


8 


LECTURES. 


nished by half a dozen trades-people, and when 
they go to make their social call, the proper 
place would be at the grocery, where the real 
giver of the feast is figuring up how much it cost 
him. He pays for it. Now, put this fact into 
common English, and what is it but a plain 
piece of rascality? Suppose any one of us 
should walk into a grocery, take up a handful 
of sugar, fill a pocket with tea, another with 
coffee, &c., it wouldn’t be long before we should 
be hustled out of the shop, and our failing adver¬ 
tised in the community. But if the thing is done 
on a grander scale, and in a more magnificent 
style—if one drives up in a carriage, calls the 
dealer out, finds fault with some recent goods, 
orders a pouch of coffee or barrel of sugar, and 
has them sent home at the tradesman’s expense, 
then when the bill isn’t paid it is a case of gen¬ 
teel embarrassment. 

We have arrived at a new terminology and 
denounce the man who takes little as a thief, 
but he who steals by wholesale is unfortunately 
embarrassed. 

When Jean Valjean crushes the thin glass 
window, between his hunger and the baker’s 
bread, he must go to the galleys—he is a thief; 
but large crimes gild themselves, and their per- 


THE TRADESMENS’ BOOKS. 


9 


petrators have genius, are smart. And yet the 
words at the head of this lecture expresses the 
sentiment which all men feel, that a man who 
steals when he is starving, is not so despicable 
as he who steals when he is living in lux¬ 
ury. For these well-to-do sharpers who infest 
society and support themselves upon the credu¬ 
lity and good nature and respect of their trades¬ 
men, these people who use their position as a 
club to knock down the fruit which they 
couldn’t secure otherwise, are infinitely meaner 
in their contemptous arrogance, and their lofty 
pride than the subservient and cringing beggar, 
who asks a crust. Which of them all on that 
list would ask his tradesman home to dine with 
him? Which of them wouldn’t be indignant 
if asked to eat dinner at the grocer’s instead of 
having it sent to his own house? Which one 
of them would be happy to hear his creditor 
say: “I know you’re poor, and haven’t anything 
to pay, let me send this bacon out to your car¬ 
riage; I want to help the poor this bitter weath¬ 
er?” That bacon wouldn’t go out of the shop. 
It would be indignantly rejected, and yet the 
poor grocer takes down the order for expen¬ 
sive game, imported fruits, rare preserves, the 
best things he has in stock, and the man who 


10 


LECTURES. 


orders them has no more idea of paying for 
them than he has of eating charity bacon. But 
he preserves his sense of superiority ; he is a 
gentleman dealing with tradesmen. He feels 
pretty safe about any publicity in the matter. 
So long as he is generally known to be a man 
of means, the tradesmen will not do more than 
privately and respectfully ask for payment now 
and then. The amount at stake is too large and 
the prospective custom too important to risk by 
any public offense. 

The interests of both parties agree for a 
good while to keep the matter silent. It it were 
a five-dollar draft left for collection at a bank, 
the man’s good name wouldn’t permit it to go 
to protest, but a hundred or two hundred dol¬ 
lars on a grocer’s books, may stand any length 
of time. But then, you say, after all there must 
Come a day of settlement, a lawsuit, or even the 
threat of one will bring the money. So I sup¬ 
posed and pointed out half a dozen cases where 
I thought the money might be recovered. But 
we live in a marvellous age. The fluctuations 
of fortune are so great that a man is rich and 
poor at the same time. When money is due 
from real estate, or any kind of property, he 
owns it and receives the money. When any 


THE TRADESMENS’ BOOKS. 


11 

money is due upon debts contracted by him, the 
property is not his, and he has no assets. He 
leads a kaleidoscopic existence, flashing back 
and forth from wealth to poverty. He is al¬ 
ways rich except when money is wanted from 
him, and then when the law inquires, the answer 
comes back—no assets. 

He is a bewildering creature. He has 
money for conspicuous expenditures. He pays 
his club dues promptly, he never fails to have 
money enough to keep his position on ’Change, 
but when the tradesman invokes the hand of 
the law to squeeze out his little account, 
it can’t find a coin. For the man has a wife, 
and the estate is in her name, or he has a sister 
or a brother in whose name the money is in¬ 
vested, or he just previously mortgaged his pro¬ 
perty, or he is just on the eve of bankruptcy 
and don’t care whether you sue or not. 

It is the most monstrous perversion of com¬ 
mon sense that a wife’s property should enable 
a man to contract debts, and yet escape liability 
for those debts in the proceeds of which she has 
been a sharer. But some of the most remark¬ 
able cases are those of accounts against estates. 
Here is an instance : A lady of very consider¬ 
able means, and of the highest integrity, after 


12 


LECTURES. 


some weeks sickness, died, leaving a good estate. 
During her life-time she had had no greater sat¬ 
isfaction than in paying every bill she had at the 
beginning of the month. At the time of her 
death, in consequence of her sickness, one of 
her accounts had run into considerable propor¬ 
tions, and that account stands to-day unpaid. 
I don’t know what monument the heirs may have 
erected to her memory, but I am sure if she 
could express her desires, she would regard that 
receipted bill laid upon her grave a grander 
monument than any of marble or stone. 

Then there are many cases where the husband 
has died, and the family debts contracted by him 
still stand, and while the widow or family who 
enjoyed the benefit of the debt are living and 
well and could pay the bill if they were willing, 
there are enough legal difficulties to prevent the 
innocent creditor from recovering the amount. 
The fact is, that peoples’ consciences are not 
so acute about tradesmens’ bills as about other 
things. There is still a dusky twilight of the 
old impression, which was so prevalent during 
the days of imprisonment for debt, that there is 
an irrepressible conflict between gentle people 
and trades-people, and that any advantages 
possible, any ruses de guerre , are justifiable. 


THE TRADESMENS’ BOOKS. 


13 


The prevalent lack of honesty in paying trades¬ 
men’s bills at least, suggests such a thought. 

There are people who have so commonly 
heard and repeated the saying, that an umbrella 
has no rights of property attaching to it, and 
that the only title to it is that of occupancy, 
that they have come to believe it and act 
upon it; and in the same way there are people 
who never look at small debts as matter of con¬ 
science, but only as offsprings of their ingen¬ 
uity and consequence. Like Mr. Skimpole, 
nothing strikes them as so absurd as the figure 
of an angry baker or butcher. But now take 
the other side of this question for a moment. 
See how serious it becomes to the tradesman 
who has himself and family to support, and his 
own credit to sustain. In the tremendous com¬ 
petition which must necessarily arise where 
there are 1,300 groceries in the same city, the 
profits can not be very large upon the average 
business done. The wholesale grocers must be 
paid for their goods, the rent must be paid, the 
tax must be paid, the perishable goods must 
somewhat depreciate, the family must be sup¬ 
ported. There is no business, probably, where 
prompt collections are more necessary than in 
the retail grocery business. Now, at the end of a 


14 


LECTURES. 


month, a bill is sent to a large buyer, he sends 
it back and asks that it may stand over for a 
short time. The next month the two bills go 
out and are again sent back. What is to be 
done ? 

The customer lives in grand style. The trades¬ 
man in two rooms, or, where he can, about his 
store. He must have money to pay his own 
bills, because he is an honest man, and can’t 
afford to have his name questioned. He timidly 
sends out his bill again and raises a storm and 
refusal, has to borrow money as he can, get in¬ 
volved in debt, keep sending good money after 
bad, furnishes his rich customer, with wines and 
delicacies, and he and his family subsist on the 
cheapest things in the shop. The accounts con¬ 
tinue to grow until the books are loaded with 
bad debts; assignment follows, and an honest 
and industrious and hard-working family is bank¬ 
rupt and ruined, and thrown out upon the street, 
where carriages dash by them for which they 
have paid just as truly as if they had drawn a 
check for the amount. Go down to one grocery 
in the city and hear this story, only there you 
will find no hesitancy as to names. A mother 
and daughter found themselves thrown upon 
their own resources, with very small capital, 


THE TRADESMENS’ BOOKS. 


*5 

not more than a few hundred dollars. The 
naturalest and easiest thing to do was to open a 
small grocery. They did so, and by frugality, 
hard work and personal solicitation they estab¬ 
lished a small trade, which enabled them to live. 
Among the customers was one whose position 
was well known, and whose means were ample. 
Day after day that customer levied tribute upon 
the little stock. Everything that was nice and 
choice went to that house, and when the bill 
rose to about a hundred dollars, payment was 
refused. It was found there was no remedy for 
the outrage, and the mother and daughter had 
to begin again to lay aside something from a 
yet narrower and more meager life. 

I am glad to have an opportunity thus publicly 
to proclaim a righteous indignation that such a 
thing is possible. There are no words in the 
English language that can fitly declare the basi¬ 
lar and creeping nature of such proceedings. 
What is the difference between this kind of 
leeching and going daily to the money till and 
taking as much money away? What is the 
difference between this and any other mode of 
obtaining goods under false pretenses, punishable 
by the criminal law? And yet, during the last 
ten years this false pretense, has ruined more than 


i6 


LECTURES. 


half the entire number of groceries in the city, 
and crippled many that are left. Of course, as 
we get down to the smaller groceries, we find the 
smaller values at which men rate themselves. 
Some sell their honor for a two dollar bill, and 
some don’t go any higher than the price of a 
beefsteak. 

3. The third and last consideration is, that on 
this list are found the name of some professing 
church members. 

It is not surprising that the names of leading 
infidel writers and Socialists occur there. It is 
the legitimate fruit of a system which demands a 
constant redivision of property and asserts the 
right of hunger and poverty to help itself from the 
tables of the rich. But that Christians holding 
positions in the Church, and looked upon as repre¬ 
sentatives of the idea of Christ’s religion, should 
allow their names to show there, is shameful 
and destructive to a pure religious influence. A 
religion is good, only so far as it molds the life. 
The statement so flippantly made that Christ¬ 
ianity offers to save men by faith, without re¬ 
gard to virtue, is made by ignorance or male¬ 
volence. Over past sins repented of, it does 
profess to cast the the mantle of forgiveness 
when the sinner offers Christ’s atonement as his 


THE TRADESMENS’ BOOKS. 


17 


plea. And there is no sin so bad, or so low, or 
so perennial, that Christianity despairs of saving 
man from it. But it saves him fi'om it, not 'with 
it. If it is possible to construct a higher system 
of ethics than that of the sermon on the Mount; 
if it is possible to set a purer morality and be¬ 
nevolence and sincerity before men than the 
example and precept of Jesus Christ, the man 
has not yet arisen to accomplish it. The man 
who believes or teaches that any one is offered 
salvation by the New Testament, without an 
earnest and sincere struggle to be pure and 
honest and true in every act and function of his 
life, is not entitled to ordinary consideration as a 
critic or a man. I have read the New Testament 
in vain if there be in it, in terms or implication, 
the slightest encouragement for any phase of dis¬ 
honesty or rascality, for the man of immoral life, 
of insincere profession, of smirched and rotten 
reputation. His encouragement begins when 
these end. And if any one believes himself to 
be a Christian, while there are a dozen men with 
pockets full of his due bills and house bills, 
dodging him at every corner, I am constrained 
to say that either he or the New Testament has 
made a mistake. The very groundwork of 
Christ’s religion is sincerity, a transparent life, 


i8 


LECTURES. 


as open to men as to God, who knows all the 
secrets of the heart. The Gospel tells us that we 
all shall be judged and give an account of the 
works done in the body. Take one of these pro¬ 
fessing Christians whose name is on the bead-roll, 
not of the saints, but of the suspended accounts 
at the Grocers’ Exchange, and what will he have 
to say for himself when those figures confront 
him there? 

“How about these bills posted and carried 
over into eternity ? ” 

“ Oh, those—those are some little matters 
between me and my grocer. I gave that money 
to my church. I consecrated it.” 

“ On what do you base your hope of salva¬ 
tion ?” 

“ On my faith in Christ’s promises, and on my 
efforts in his church.” 

Out of your own mouth you are condemned. 
The promises of Jesus Christ in which you so 
implicitly believed, was that no defrauder or 
liar, or thief should escape punishment, and as 
to your charities to the church, they go to the 
grocer who paid them. 

Let us tear away the thin veils which obscure 
facts and deform the truths. Look the matter 
straight in the face, and there is one immutable, 


THE TRADESMENS’ BOOKS. 


19 


tremorless proposition imbedded in reason and 
revelation; the man who is a scoundrel in his 
dealings with men is not less a scoundrel before 
God. Nothing can shake that truth and repent¬ 
ance which may change his position before 
God is not repentance until he does what he 
can to change his position before his fellowmen. 
It is the superlative absurdity of human folly 
for a man who dodges every other man he 
sees, and like Swiveller, has to invent a new 
way home every night to escape his creditors, 
to believe that he is a pleasant and satisfactory 
object to his God. Without speaking judicially 
upon the matter, and only from a supposition as 
to the effects of a true religion on the life, I am 
apt to think that when all a man’s earthly ac¬ 
quaintances, or any great number of them, have 
upon facts shown, adjudged him to be a rascal, 
he has no great reason, without thorough repent¬ 
ance shown by equally pertinent facts, to expect 
a reversal of that decree hereafter. 

The faith which saves a man is never sep¬ 
arated from the repentance which is an active 
force repairing the faults and errors of the past, 
so far as the rapid stream of time has not 
whirled them from his reach. 

To the Christian with possibilities given 


20 


LECTURES. 


bim, the higher law of his religion has a su¬ 
preme jurisdiction. It knows nothing of stat¬ 
utes made by any other law, except so far as they 
protect him while innocent, and shield him 
when unfortunate and crushed without moral 
responsibility. Religion, which knows no div¬ 
isions of time, but is a power of Eternity, will 
not hear of statutes of limitations and bars of 
outlawry against honest debts and obligations. 
To him who is able to pay, a debt is a perpetu¬ 
al and prior claim. It never grows old. Its 
grasp upon him tightens as he begins to pros¬ 
per, and he can never be satisfied until it is sat¬ 
isfied. There can be no question that Jesus 
Christ intended his disciples to have an acute 
and sensitive conscience, and to avoid debt as 
a dishonest and leprous thing. I see that some 
organization has been discussing the question, 
“Are church members to be trusted ?” As an 
abstract proposition, I believe that the great 
weight of the moral sense and moral virtues of 
the people are within the church, however 
much hypocrisy and cant may have found its 
way in beside them; but if this association 
wants details as to their subject, I suggest 
they may get them and do some good by exam¬ 
ining the suspended accounts of city tradesmen. 


THE TRADESMENS’ BOOKS. 


21 


But I must not, by all means, forget to say one 
more thing, which is that some names will be 
found there which are not dishonored, and 
which have no taint of fraud. Many who con¬ 
tracted debts in time of affluence, having been 
stripped of all they have by the calamities of 
later years, are earnestly and honestly clearing 
away their debts by small payments. The debts 
which wealth recklessly incurred are slowly and 
painfully being wiped out by the exertions of 
poverty, but these names shine out upon the 
long lists like diamonds amid the mire. 

I have an intense desire to make the pulpit 
of this church as powerful an influence for good 
as it was designed to be when you erected the 
church. You placed it here and called me to 
occupy it, not that you might be entertained and 
your aesthetic tastes ministered to, but that this 
new church should be a public benefactor and 
moral influence in the city, such that men would 
not willingly see it die. When my work 
among you shall be done, I want no higher 
eulogy than the common agreement that while 
I have not neglected the mighty truths of the 
Gospel, which shine along the pathway to 
heaven, I have enforced upon you with equal 
fervor the necessity of an honest, manly and 


22 


LECTURES. 


sincere intercourse with our fellow-men. If 
Christianity is losing its hold upon society, look 
for the reason in the infidelity of its disciples, 
not its enemies. The fort which would stand 
forever impregnable from external force, may 
not stand long against internal disobedience and 
treachery. Carlyle said a true thing when he 
spoke of would-be great reformers: 66 Reform 
yourself, and then there will be one less rascal 
in the world.” The time will never come when 
men shall throw away the sacred influences of 
Christ’s religion; for in its purpose and effect it 
revivifies and stimulates the conscience of hu¬ 
manity. It makes man a new creature, in that 
it substitutes the Conscience or Holy Spirit in 
the place of the Passions, as the mark of per¬ 
sonality. A Christian’s conscience becomes 
himself, and when you are such a Christian that 
to that real inner self you can always be true. 

“ It must follow as the night the day, 

Thou canst not then be false to any man.” 


Food Corrupters. 


Some five weeks ago, I delivered a lecture 
against those persons who dishonestly obtained 
goods from their tradesmen. I spoke with some 
amazement and much indignation of the preval¬ 
ence of such fraud, and of its debilitating effects 
upon the conscience. At that time I had in¬ 
tended to follow the attack upon the swindling 
buyer, with this attack upon the swindling sel¬ 
ler, and thus lay open the whole system of chi¬ 
canery and false pretence which obtains in the 
mercantile world—a system which has degen¬ 
erated into a mere guerilla war between sharp 
buyer and sharp dealer, where both are defraud¬ 
ed and both bankrupt in common honesty, 
where the unpaid bills represent false promises 
and where the goods delivered for them are 
miserable pretenses and shams, often poisonous 
and destructive. 



24 


LECTURES. 


But even now, when so much time has inter¬ 
vened since the last lecture, though the contrast 
may be weakened, it can not but be beneficial 
to the common interests of society for the pulpit 
to denounce in unmeasured terms the well 
known and commonly practiced fraud of adult¬ 
erating and debasing the staple articles of social 
consumption, foods, drinks, medicines, wearing 
apparel, everything that is bought and sold. 
There has undoubtedly been a vast exaggera¬ 
tion in some writings that have recently appeared 
upon the subject of adulterations, but it is un¬ 
questionable that there is a vast and rapidly 
growing falsification, debasing, counterfeiting, 
alloying, adulterating and juggling going on in 
those staple articles which everybody uses, and 
which make the physical health of the Nation. 

This is one of the most serious evils that can 
affect a society. No one can stab it in a more 
vital spot. No one can work so much perman¬ 
ent mischief upon it in all of its many functions, 
political, moral, intellectual and religious, as he 
who poisons the sources whence all these func¬ 
tions derive their strength. 

The materialistic philosophy of the day tells us 
that the thoughts in Milton’s Paradise Lost, are 
only so much bread and meat which the brain 


FOOD CORRUPTERS. 


25 


has taken from the blood and secreted after its 
own manner. Such a blurring of the distinc¬ 
tions between the material and mental must be 
always detected by any mind that can differenti¬ 
ate a vessel from the wind which impels it, or a 
fibre of cotton from the loom that weaves it. 
But there is a mighty truth in the converse of 
the proposition. All the thoughts in the Para¬ 
dise Lost, did have behind them as a necessary 
cause the bread and meat by which Milton 
lived, and the mightiest flights of his genius 
through those celestial and unseen planes 
where only a few kindred souls in all the cen¬ 
turies have spread their wings, were possible 
only as he had pure and wholesome food. 
The ship is not the wind, but can not move 
without it. The cotton is not the loom, but can 
not be a fabric without it. Now look at this 
great question of food supply from its effect 
on the whole product of the social forces; bind 
the sublime song of Milton to a loaf of bread in 
a London bakery, think of the energy of Wil- 
berforce or Howard as rising or flagging with 
the quality of his tradesmen’s goods; think of 
the moral character of every child, as moulded 
to a certain extent by the purity and impurity of 
his nourishment, and this becomes one of the 


26 


LECTURES. 


most important questions in our life. Are we 
getting pure and good food from those whose 
business it is to supply us? Just as certainly as 
we can know anything we know this, that bodily 
weaknesses induce mental and moral weak- 
nesses, and that deleterious and false food breaks 
down the body. The man who gives my child, 
instead of pure and nourishing bread, for which 
I pay him, a miserable simulacrum of bread, a 
debased and deleterious article, which makes no 
more blood, and poisons what there is, is in 
every sense a villain and a murderer. So far as 
he is able, he begins a process of lingering 
death. He gives him with a smiling face and 
pleasant word a partial paralyzer of all his en¬ 
ergies. Long after he may have have forgotten 
his petty fraud, its consequences, which he can 
not trammel up, follow with the untiring and 
sleepless vigilance of Nemesis upon every effort 
of my child’s life. The mere money considera¬ 
tion is nothing, comparatively. If it were mere¬ 
ly this, that a sharp piece of business has suc¬ 
ceeded in getting something for nothing, and my 
loss could be measured by the weight of a coin, 
it might not be worth speaking of in this age of 
gigantic fraud and malfeasance. 


FOOD CORRUPTERS. 


27 


We feel with Othello that the money thief 
takes mere trash— 

*Tis something, nothing; 

’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands— 

But he who takes away health and peace and 
energy, by giving my blood a stone when it asks 
for bread, and when it asks for fish giving it a 
serpent— 

Robs me of that, which not enriches him. 

And makes me poor indeed. 

No fraud like this which is a conspiracy to de¬ 
stroy society through its fountains of life, which 
turns the food by which it lives into the poison 
by which it dies; which juggles with all the sta¬ 
ple articles of daily consumption, until the real 
and the counterfeit, the pure and the alloy, the 
food and the poison can be distinguished only 
by the laboratory and the microscope, no such 
fraud as this can be unworthy of the notice and 
denunciation of the pulpit and the press. The 
vast increase in nervous diseases in our day 
may be accounted for by the habits of our life 
in part, but it is certain that it is in part also 
due to the debasing, counterfeiting, corrupting, 
and falsifying of those common articles which 
are in daily use. I say again, I am not deluded 
by all the sensational statements upon this 
subject of adulterations. In the nature of things 


28 


LECTURES. 


a suspicion of one article soon spreads to all 
and as people are always ready to believe and 
report more than is necessary, such general sus¬ 
picion finds universal credulity. But when all 
proper allowance is made for the general dispo- 
position of people to believe the marvelous, 
there is ample ground for dismay when unim¬ 
peachable evidence proves how far this perni¬ 
cious abuse has been developed. There are two 
aspects of the case which I shall present to-night 
as especially important and fit for this desk. 

The first is the evil effect of this adulterating 
practice upon the general consumers in the com¬ 
munity. This is the important aspect from the 
point of view of political economy, and it is 
difficult to separate a great question of political 
economy from the other ramifying interests of 
society. We are beginning to discover that 
the spiritual and intellectual condition of a man 
is largely affected by his physical surroundings, 
and that the Gospel has a far more perfect 
work in a comfortable home, than in a tene¬ 
ment house. God may educate the powers of 
the soul in the filthiest spot on earth. He may 
make a saint even amid the vermin and dirt of 
an anchorite’s cell, but the well housed, prop¬ 
erly nourished, well lighted, clear aired man 


FOOD CORRUPTERS. 


29 


will, other things being equal, be the most 
vigorous and bright in his moral, intellectual 
and religious nature. You may try all your 
life to make a man with disordered and 
irritated stomach cheerful and patient, and 
not succeed, and yet patience is a moral 
virtue, and the stomach is so much tissue 
and fiber and muscle. The physician and doc¬ 
tor must go together. Jesus called Luke, the 
physician, to be his helper, and to-day the 
Church needs to ally herself with the great 
body of sanitarians who are striving to make 
men healthier and more comfortable. The an¬ 
cient proverb, “Mens sana in corpore scinoP 
meant to express, by implication, that the un¬ 
soundness of either mind or body affected the 
other, and the Gospel sent to help men reach a 
better life, can not better lay the approaches for 
its work than in driving out all the causes of 
physical degeneration and misery. As death is 
the completed disease, and death can not be 
prevented, no exertion can drive out all causes 
of disease, but many of them can be eradicated 
by a well directed effort to improve the quality 
of the food on which the people live. 

When we come to examine the facts in this 
case of adulterations, we are struck by the vast 


3° 


LECTURES. 


increase of the fraud and the gradual with¬ 
drawal of the old barriers against it. The in¬ 
creased facilities of commerce by which space 
is almost annihilated, and goods brought into 
market from vast distances, have been destruc¬ 
tive to the censorship of the market, which 
was common two hundred years ago. The 
only protection which you and I have now 
when we buy coffee or flour is the subjective 
help of the law proposition —caveat emptor -— 
let the buyer beware. But two hundred years 
ago the citizens of Antwerp, or London, or 
Genoa, had the mighty protection of an organ¬ 
ized and efficient supervision of every salable 
article. Before the tradesman could show his 
flour, or his sugar, it had passed under the in¬ 
spection of his Guild, and the man who de¬ 
based his wares knew the penalty was expul¬ 
sion from his Guild, and expulsion from his 
Guild operated as a complete estoppel upon his 
business. But when the Guilds began to fall 
before the mighty currents of supplies setting 
in from every quarter of the globe, the princi¬ 
ples of free-trade swept away every barrier, 
even the excise supervision, and left the com¬ 
munity to the greed and cunning of any unscru¬ 
pulous merchant. Not that all the care possible 


FOOD CORRUPTERS. 


31 


had been able to prevent some adulterations. 
Take bread, for instance, the one article which 
all must have, and one therefore offering the 
greatest temptation to knavish tampering: when 
one considers the enormous number of loaves 
sold in a year, he sees how profitable a slight 
saving on each loaf will be. Now, if the size 
and appearance of the loaf can be preserved 
while less material is put into it, there is at 
once an easy and profitable fraud. Conse¬ 
quently this kind of fraud has obtained for 
many hundred years, as the statute book shows, 
and is common to-day. The flour is mixed 
with alum, sulphate of copper, chalk, rice, or 
other foreign substance. It is stated upon com¬ 
petent authority that 100 pounds of good flour 
will make from 133 to 137 pounds of bread, and 
280 pounds should make ninety-five loaves of 
four pounds each. But with three or four 
pounds of boiled rice mixed into the flour, a 
baker may get one hundred loaves of the same 
appearing bread, which is bad and unhealthy, 
and rapid in decay. I have not taken any pains 
to find out what is the quality of the bread sold 
in Cincinnati to-day, but from the recent action 
of the Council requiring the baker to stamp 
each loaf with its weight, I imagine there must 
be some suspicion of adulteration. 


32 


LECTURES. 


The old statute of “pillory and tumbrel” ris¬ 
ing up out of the shadows of six hundred and 
fifty years might be of some efficacy even 
to-day, although it was the first penal enactment 
against food-corrupters: 

“ If any default shall be found in the bread of 
a baker, the first time let him be drawn upon a 
hurdle from the Guildhall to his own house, 
through the great streets where there be most 
people assembled, with the faulty loaf hanging 
upon his neck. The second time, kept in the 
pillory one hour in the day. The third time, 
let the oven be pulled down and the baker made 
to forswear his trade forever.” 

The conscience of that day seemed to be 
more sensitive than ours. There was no mawk¬ 
ish sentimentality which prevented the commu¬ 
nity from protecting itself against scoundrels. 
The man who stole a half-penny from every 
poor woman who bought his bread was not too 
good for the vilest treatment by the common 
hangman. From the days of the first enact¬ 
ment, twelve years prior to the great charter, 
the statute books show how prevalent adulter¬ 
ations were and how hard to punish. Coffee 
came into common use about the time of the 
•restoration of the Stuarts and yet the first penal 


FOOD CORRUPTERS. 


33 


acts of the Hanoverian Kings were directed 
against its adulteration. The man who first 
drank it in London lived to see the time when 
the article sold as coffee was adulterated fully 
one-half. In our own days the English Parlia¬ 
ment in i860, 1869, 1871 and 1872 passed acts 
against the general custom of adulteration, and 
when dealers in chicory and coffee were visited 
and their goods sampled, it was found that 
where there was adulteration, the proportions of 
chicory ranged from 29 per cent, to 90 per cent., 
and to supplement this we are told now that 
even chicory itself is largely adulterated. 

The author of the article upon “Food Cor¬ 
ruption ” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, from 
whom I gather many of the facts in this lecture, 
affirms that coffee berries are now manufactured 
from various vegetable substances by an ingen¬ 
ious machine invented for the purpose, and I 
have seen the statement that common white 
earth is sometimes moulded into the same shape 
and thrown into the coffee sack. In an analysis 
made by the Massachusetts Board of Plealth in 
1872, a sample sold as ground coffee was de¬ 
clared to have no coffee in it at all. And the 
person that drank that concoction may have 
been a poor invalid, depending on its stimulating 


34 


LECTURES. 


influences. There are many men living to-day 
who can tell us of the miserable sham food that 
was sometimes given them when serving in the 
army. Men rolling in wealth at home getting 
large contracts to supply the soldiers in the field, 
sent them provisions so bad and adulterated that 
they became more fatal than the shells and bay¬ 
onets of the enemy. Among the million of our 
fallen soldiers sleeping on the hillsides and in 
the valleys of the South where the plough is 
toiling through the fields that the cannon fur¬ 
rowed, there are many whose true obituary 
would be, 66 Assassinated by the army con¬ 
tractor.” When the great reveille is sounded 
and the roll is called, it will be found that the 
fell genius of Lee and Longstreet and Johnston 
all together was not equal to the deadly influ¬ 
ence of the quartermasters’ stores. It slew its 
thousands, but bad bread, rotten bacon, adul¬ 
terated drugs, shoddy clothes, furnished by the 
scoundrels at home, slew their ten thousands. 
And that same slaughtering process is pro¬ 
ceeding in society to-day—less conspicuously, 
it is true, but surely, and the vast bills of mor¬ 
tality are swelled by the victims of this per¬ 
nicious system of theft and fraud. Every article 
of family use is tampered with and damaged. 


FOOD CORRUPTERS. 


35 


Tea is largely adulterated by the Chinese them^ 
selves. Old, virtueless, lifeless leaves are care¬ 
fully gathered, dried, colored and resold. Many 
small-leaved plants are added in this country, 
and there are establishments where this agree¬ 
able specific for the nerves and headaches is 
made from leaves of Pennsylvania herbs, which 
pass through the curling machine and so much 
resemble tea as to deceive the ordinary con¬ 
sumer. When the dishonesty of trade rises into 
the furiousness of drunken recklessness, you 
may find your tea weighed down with iron 
filings and slugs. Flour, from the time it leaves 
the wheat, ceases gradually to be itself. A little 
marble-dust blends with it and increases its 
weight, and lays the foundation of long disease 
in him who eats it. Sugar in its white form is 
mostly pure, but in its brown form largely adul¬ 
terated. The colored confectionery which chil- 
drer consume in such quantities is often made 
with most virulent poisons. Mustards and spices 
are robbed of their virtue and sold in utmost 
impotency. Beer, which on account of its price, 
has been, and will be the great drink of the 
laboring classes, is adulterated with pepper, salt, 
copperas, opium, hemp, strychnine, tobacco, 
darnel seed, logwood, zinc, lead and alum. 


36 


LECTURES. 


It is hardly worth while to speak of the wines 
which are called imported wines, and which are 
notoriously fraudulent. Tobacco and snuff 
show enormous adulteration' with dangerous 
substances. The fourth report of the Commis¬ 
sioners of Inland Revenue in England showed 
that fifty-two per cent, of snuff inspected was 
illicit. These all are articles of enormous con¬ 
sumption. They enter more largely than any¬ 
thing else into the ordinary demands of the 
people and, just so far as they are bad, affect the 
entire community. If tobacco be bad in its 
best state, how much worse is it when oil and 
lamp-black, tannic acid, logwood and aloes are 
consumed with it. If the best liquors may drive 
men crazy and fill police-stations and peniten¬ 
tiaries, what is more necessary for us than to 
guard against that chef d'oeuvre of diabolic in¬ 
vention which debases them yet more and sifts 
into them the germs of lingering mental death? 
Over the two great articles of milk and meat 
we have some city supervision by the Board of 
Health, and every year there are enormous 
quantities of meat condemned which, without 
such authority, would be sold in our markets. 
By the report of the Health Officer for 1875, I 
find there were 42,633 pounds of dressed meat 


FOOD CORRUPTERS. 


37 


offered for sale in the markets and condemned 
by the Health Officer, and 25,000 pounds of fish, 
which, without such supervising authority,would 
have been purchased and eaten by people of 
small means. Those who know anything of the 
extreme needs of many poor people, need not 
be told that such food as this would be cheer¬ 
fully bought if the price were less than ordinary. 

Then the article of milk, the most important 
one in the entire range of foods, is likewise 
subject to manipulation and adulteration. The 
reader of the health reports of this city for the 
last ten years knows how much that office has 
done to keep this great staple pure and whole¬ 
some. Yet every year the reports show some 
cases of vast fraud, where families have been 
using milk which, if not absolutely pernicious, 
is diluted and worthless. I have myself seen a 
man stop his milk wagon on Sycamore Hill, and 
pump two or three buckets of water into his cans, 
without the slightest regard to the people who 
were observing him. And milk is the only food 
of a very large element of the population, and 
impure milk the cause of a large amount of the 
summer diseases among children. 

There is no time to go on with the itemizing 
of frauds. The counts are as numerous as the 


38 


LECTURES. 


articles used. The sacred bed of suffering hu¬ 
manity where by instinct men are hushed and 
sympathetic, where the softest emotions of our 
better nature are elicited, even by a stranger’s 
cry—even there, where the strongest efforts of 
our human help, with all the skill and appli¬ 
ances of the healing art, are, with anguish seen 
to be of no effect, where heaven and earth are 
searched for some relieving agent, even there, 
before that mighty altar of our mortality, the 
very emblem of sincerity and truth, this hypo- 
critic and lustful spirit of fraud thrusts itself, 
and hateful shams, worship there under the 
livery of blessed medicine. Man’s inhumanity 
to man never sinks to more basilar depths than 
when he stands by the deathbed, and remorse¬ 
lessly snatches away the healing remedies, the 
banisher of pain, the “ drowsy sirups of the 
East, which medicine to slumber!” And yet 
in the city of Marseilles, there is one house 
whose sole business is, to adulterate and de¬ 
flower Turkey opium, and Dr. J. M. Bailey, of 
New York, reported to the New York Academy 
of Medicine that in the first year of the opera¬ 
tion of the law forbidding importation of foreign 
adulterations, 90,000 pounds of drugs had been 
condemned. In the wonderful nature of man. 



FOOD CORRUPTERS. 


39 


the instinct of selfish greed, hyena-like, follows 
even to its victim’s grave, while all the virtues, 
which are its fellows stand at a distance, dis¬ 
solved in sympathetic tears. 

II. Beside this first aspect of the case, think 
now of the other one — the moral influence of 
such a system of fraud upon the individual 
guilty of its practice. 

Here the pulpit has its most legitimate func¬ 
tions. It can not blind its eye to the fact that 
this great organized conspiracy against society, 
is the conscious wickedness of many individual 
souls. To warn and denounce such men is its 
privilege and its duty. Shall it glow with en- 
ergy and burn with zeal against the common 
thief, who steals a dinner or a covering, and is 
forever branded with the crime, and even in his 
silent grave, is as surely remembered as a com¬ 
mon thief as if, like his brothers of a past age, 
he were buried in the cross-roads with the stake 
through his body ; shall it be brave only where 
no bravery is needed, and loud-mouthed amid 
the mob, or shall it turn to the thieves who roll 
in carriages, snuffing up the incense which 
money evokes, and by all the powers of its liv¬ 
ing truths, by its reverberating echoes of the 
dying voices of the conscience, by its mighty 


40 


LECTURES. 


appeals to the sense of human rights, by its 
clear-toned denunciation of God’s wrath upon 
every form of lie and theft, rock these men 
from the pedestal of their criminal carelessness, 
as Felix was convulsed upon his guilty throne, 
when Paul reasoned of a judgment to come? 

Let it turn, let it turn from criminality in rags 
to criminality enthroned ; let it move for awhile 
out of the b} T -ways and lanes of Jerusalem, 
where common sin revels and grows, into the 
palaces where it can grow no more, only be¬ 
cause it has passed beyond the period of its 
summer ripeness. Where is the man who, from 
his easy desk directs his clerk to stab his own 
conscience and lie for him to customer after 
customer as to the nature and purity of goods 
which he himself has adulterated by his master's 
order ? Young men come to me and ask 
what they shall do when they must choose be¬ 
tween fraud and poverty. Shall they steep 
their souls in lies to sell Porto Rico for New 
Orleans molasses ? Shall they with unquiver¬ 
ing lip affirm that a scoopful of curled leaves, 
which they themselves have seen thrown into 
the tea chest, is the best imported tea ! Are 
these the business principles which shall make 
honest and trustworthy employes, or do they lie 


FOOD CORRUPTERS. 


41 


at the bottom of the false trusts, the forced bal¬ 
ances, the stolen goods, the carnival of fraud 
through which the mercantile world is masquer¬ 
ading now ? You can’t expect to educate a man 
to be sharp and cunning to defraud your custo¬ 
mers and frank and honest to account to you. If 
they are taught that the first duty of a salesman 
is to sell goods without regard to truth or can¬ 
dor, the entire system of business is apt to 
resolve itself in their minds to one proposition 
—overreach. Never mind about honor, equity, 
mercantile courtesy • you have taught them that 
after all, the aim of the business man is to get 
money and to get it by sharp wit if they can. 

That is a very simple principle and you must 
not be astonished if they discover some day 
that they can make money faster by defrauding 
you than your customers. You- can’t sharpen a 
man as you do a sword, keeping the edge all on 
one side. Sharp, or as we say, smart, business 
craft keeps a keen edge flashing in every direc¬ 
tion like the angels at the gate of Eden. We 
don’t realize the personal effect of this vast sys¬ 
tem of adulterations and debasements, because 
we regard the system as a whole, and do not fol¬ 
low it into its springs and sources. But let your 
Imagination—fori hope your memory would be 


42 


LECTURES. 


powerless—dwell on the daily life of a man who 
deals in such adulterated goods. For, mark 
you, there is a conscious villainy in some part 
of the chain between the first and last handler 
of the article. Some man is just as guilty and 
knows it just as well as the unknown man in 
the days of the Stuarts who detained the coin long 
enough to pare it down a little before he passed 
it on again. Now suppose such a man behind 
his counter. He may be, and in many cases is 
perhaps, a moral man, and I suppose a religious 
man. That is to say, in every relation of life 
but that of selling goods, he is beyond reproach 
and feels a satisfaction in knowing it. But from 
the first penny that falls into his till to the last 
one at night, there may not be one which has 
not made him lie. The goods are just what the 
the customer wants, and they change with pro¬ 
tean facility with the customer’s demands. 
You understand me, that lam not saying this of 
the trade in general, which, like every other 
trade and profession, has good members and 
bad, but of such members of it as swell their 
profits by adulterating their goods, or selling 
those already adulterated. The Prussian penal 
code supposes every vender of bad goods to be 
aware of such defect, and hold him responsible 


FOOD CORRUPTERS. 


43 


as it ought to. Such a man can not say these 
goods are not what they seem to be, they are 
made up of so many parts of this, and so many 
of that. He must boldly declare them to be 
what he knows they are not, and stick to it 
through every form of question, and through a 
hundred repeated questions, throughout the 
day. When business is slack, the moral ledger 
like the office one, is pretty free from bad ac¬ 
counts, but when business freshens, the lies 
must fall thick as leaves in Vallambrosa. Is the 
false profit worth the false life ? Is the swelling 
fortune worth having with the contracted heart? 
Does not the Etna of lies and deceit at last 
smother and crush the efforts of the soul to rise ? 

The days of Jeremiah are not of twenty-four 
hours. They are cycles, and we are living in 
them yet, for “ every one, from the least to the 
greatest, is given to covetousness, every one 
dealeth falsely.” 

I know the competitions of trade are great, that 
there are a thousand men ready to make the 
profit which your scruples forbid you to take. 
But this is only saying what has been true from 
the beginning, that honesty has an eternal foe, 
and that the standard of victory seems to alter¬ 
nate between the right and wrong ; but the 


44 


LECTURES. 


place of the true man, of him who follows 
Jesus Christ, and puts his ear down always to 
the voice of the conscience, is in the ranks of 
those who war against every kind of wrong, and 
in his mercantile life to say no word and do no 
act which, dying, he would wish to blot. If it 
be right to take that which others would if we 
refuse, we might as well be upon the highways 
or in the burglars’ camp. And if it be the wis¬ 
dom of this world to gather money by any 
means, if its motto is ; “Put money in thy 
purse,” it is the wisdom of a pure religion, pro¬ 
testing against the infidelity of the day which 
bids men who are determined to grow rich upon 
the wages of sin to look beyond the day, when 
their nerveless fingers shall not close upon a 
coin, and that wisdom, not in a motto, but in an 
awful truth, grounds itself in one overwhelming 
consideration, “What shall it profit a man if he 
gain the whole world and lose his own soul ?” 


THE STORY 


— OF— 

The Auditor’s Books. 


It is a startling thing to know that a great 
number of the best people of Cincinnati delib¬ 
erately perjure themselves every Spring. It 
takes one’s breath away to conceive the possi¬ 
bility of ten thousand right hands going up to¬ 
gether, and ten thousand tongues deliberately 
lying in the sight and name of God, and with 
all the sanctions which law and conscience can 
throw around the solemnity of an oath. Go down 
to the Court House to-morrow and see a witness 
in the box. Mark the sense of responsibility 
which the oath has imposed upon his utterance. 
Out of that boXj his conversation is free from 
the especial consecration which it must here re¬ 
gard. He carefully and thoughtfully weighs 
every syllable and tests every word by laborious 
reference to memory and note. The tremend¬ 
ous weight of an oath lies upon him, and, 



46 


LECTURES. 


although he be a man of strictest veracity in 
every word and action of his daily life> yet here 
he recognizes a position where additional pre¬ 
caution against error must be taken, and where 
truth , all of it, and nothing else, must be pro¬ 
duced. 

It is the supposition of the law that sworn 
witnesses tell the truth. The long line of de¬ 
ponents filing into the box and out again 
throughout the year, speaking words that un¬ 
settle estates, send men to the gallows and 
penitentiary, change public affairs and mold 
social interests, are supposed to speak truthfully, 
at least in intention, even though the weakness of 
human faculties be such that they may err in 
particulars. What a condition should we be in 
if it were true and known to be true, that the 
great majority of all such witnesses deliberately 
and knowingly violated their oath and con¬ 
science, and invested Falsehood with the official 
robes of Truth ! To raise the thought of a 
society where even the solemn and rigorous 
processes of law, bound up together with the 
highest demands of religion and morality, can 
not determine in ordinary cases between truth 
and perjury, is to imagine a society rotten to its 
center. The days of the thumb-screw and 


THE AUDITOR’S BOOKS. 


47 


Scavenger’s-daughter, and other instruments of 
torture as means of eliciting truth, have gone 
by forever. 

The only reliance and safeguard of modern so¬ 
ciety is the Conscience of its aggregate mem¬ 
bership. While it supposes and knows that 
there will be sporadic cases of fraud and per¬ 
jury, and provides penalties against them, yet it 
rests upon the broad postulate of the reliability 
of sworn testimony. When the presumption in 
general litigation is against the veracity of each 
witness, we are at the breaking up of the present 
social order. But then it is true that in matters 
of personal interest, such as listing one’s property 
for taxation, there is a presumption against the 
return, even under oath. The simple truth is, 
that the County Auditor’s books show that many 
persons perjure themselves—that is, deliberately 
and knowingly assert that to be true which they 
know to be false. It does’nt make any differ¬ 
ence what your opinion and mine may be as to 
the law under which we are required to list our 
property for taxation. It may be an infamous 
law, but it can not justify perjury to evade it. 
No tax, no law can be more unjust or in¬ 
iquitous or ruinous to social interests than per¬ 
jury is and ever will be. No man ever laid a 


48 


LECTURES. 


rational unction to his soul for the guilt of a 
sworn lie, when he justilied himself by the bad¬ 
ness of the law which swears him, and while I 
believe there arc many false returns of property 
made through ignorance, it is impossible to 
doubt that fraud and cunning are the parents of 
the larger number. It will not be many weeks 
before the Assessors will leave their blanks 
again, and this is a good time to stir up the con¬ 
sciences of the taxpayers by dwelling upon the 
facts of the business. The question has nothing 
to do with real estate. The fixedness of that 
kind of taxable property and its appraisement 
every ten years, deprive the individual owner of 
much opportunity to use his conscience. 

It is the fugitive property which opens the 
door to fraud. When one is called upon to put 
on the duplicate a statement of his personal 
property, he knows that very few have any 
knowledge of how much he has, or of what 
shape it is in, and the consciousness of this, is 
the first temptation to lie. There is undoubted¬ 
ly, a very deep, universal, and yet mysterious 
repugnance in human nature to allowing others 
to know how much movable property one has. 
The man who owns land displays the fact, is 
glad to have it known and makes much of it. 


THE AUDITOR’S BOOKS. 


49 


But he, whose income is derived from money 
securities, etc., is reticent to a degree. When 
the law comes to him and says : “ Write down 
here a statement of your personal effects,” he 
feels the same objection. It is an intrusion 
upon his privacy, it is prying into his secret life, 
it is using the power of the government to do 
that which no free government should do. Now, 
I believe this feeling of indignation lies at the 
bottom of the vast fabric of fraud in the return 
of personal property. It is no excuse, but it is 
a cause for dishonesty. Like the income tax, like 
every tax which can be collected only by an 
intrusion upon domestic privacy, it offers a prem¬ 
ium to falsehood. During the long and expen¬ 
sive career of Rome under the Emperors, no such 
branch of revenue was known. The imperial 
power was maintained by land-duties and excise 
duties, until conquests enabled her to live on the 
tribute of conquered nations. Under Augustus, 
some additional revenue being necessary, a five 
per cent tax was laid upon all legacies and inheri¬ 
tances from which a vast revenue was derived, 
As they had no laws of entail and settlement, such 
as now exist, this tax was especially suitable to 
an age when arbitrary wills were common. 
How much such a tax would produce we may 

i 


LECTURES* 


estimate from the case of Cicero, who received 
from those whom he had defended, legacies to 
the amount of £ 170.000, and the younger Pliny, 
received nearly as much. Thus, in two or three 
generations, the entire property of the Empire 
passed through the coffers of the State without 
any special hardship to the subject. The an¬ 
cient nations did not know what it was to tax 
personal property, though the later emperors, 
especially Severns and Caracal la, taxed in kind 
—that is. demanded so much wheat or oil, or 
produce from the entire yield. Nor has the 
Anglo-Saxon race ever looked with favor upon 
such modes of raising revenue. The student of 
English history, from the days of Henry' III, and 
the first Parliament, can not but see that the 
mind of England has been in all ages against 
any kind of taxation except land tax and a mod¬ 
erate custom duty'. 

An excise bill nearly unseated Walpole, the 
most sagacious Chance 11 or of Exchequer, Eng¬ 
land ever had, and the Stuarts, lost their throne 
by illegal and distasteful forms of taxation. It 
is undoubtedly' true that a well devised tax upon 
real estate would diffuse itself throughout the 
entire community, and like all custom duties, 
would in the end be paid by the great body of 


THE AUDITOR’S BOOKS. 


51 


the people. A personal tax, is, I believe, only 
an inducement to rascality and perjury, and the 
revenue which it brings in, does not compensate 
for the honor and veracity which it drives out. 
While this is true, as I believe, yet the fact re¬ 
mains, that while this system obtains and men 
have to list their private effects under it, they 
are bound by every bond to be honest and true 
in their dealings in the matter. Whatever 
others may do, there is but one thing for the 
Christian to do, and that is reverently and ad¬ 
visedly and in the fear of God, to return his 
property in accordance with conscience and 
religion. 

We have no business with evasions and de¬ 
ceits, and subterfuges and mental reservations. 
The oath is clear and explicit, and leaves no 
room for any doubt in the Christian conscience. 
“I do solemnly swear, that, to the best of my 
knowledge and belief, I have listed or exhibited 
to the Assessor all the personal propertys, 
moneys, credits, over and above my indebted¬ 
ness, investments in bonds, stocks, joint stock 
companies, or otherwise, in my possession or 
under my control as owner or holder, or as hus¬ 
band, parent, guardian, executor, or administra¬ 
tor, receiver, accounting officer, agent, attorney 


5 2 


LECTURES. 


or factor, on the day preceding the second 
Monday of April, which are subject to taxation 
under the laws of this State.” Under that iron 
clad oath there is no possibility of an honest re¬ 
servation. It means perfect conscientiousness or 
downright perjury. The story of Ananias must 
be a forgotten legend when Christians can stand 
up and take that oath to a return which keeps 
back a large part of their effects to save a few, 
or a few hundred dollars. What is this, then, 
that one reads at the Auditor’s office—that many 
Christians do notoriously refuse to list their en¬ 
tire property? What is this fact staring us in 
the face, that the Equalization Board every year 
has to come to the assistance of some con¬ 
sciences, Christian consciences sometimes, and 
convince a man that he has two or three times 
as much money taxable as he believes. We 
may divide the entire subject into three parts, 
and we shall find all the cases falling under either 
the conscience confused, the conscience sick, or 
the conscience dead and buried. 

I. THE CONSCIENCE CONFUSED. 

There are undoubtedly many persons whose 
returns of personal property are fraudulent, 
but they, themselves, are in a state of per- 


THE AUDITOR’S BOOKS. 


53 


plexity and doubt about the matter. The law, 
as to the return of stock at an average monthly 
valuation, such valuation terminating in April, 
whereas their own account of stock has taken 
place three months before, are very confusing. 
The taxable personalty of a banking company, 
with complicated accounts of credit and debt, 
and taxable securities passing into untaxable, 
and back again throughout the year, together 
with the uncertainty of discounted notes, may be 
hard to ascertain. The many things to be con¬ 
sidered in making the statement for a large 
manufactory, the knowledge of what a thing 
costs, and uncertainty as to what it is actually 
worth—all these things combine to confuse an 
honest man at times, and, he makes a return 
which others say at once is false and which 
really is erroneous. 

This is not a disposition to defraud in the se¬ 
vere sense of the word. It is the same case as 
the sharp bargain in business, where a man 
stands inside the law, but reaches over. He 
don’t want to pay more than he ought to, and 
he shaves everything while he returns every¬ 
thing. He has a general and vague realization 
that close scrutiny might find larger valuations, 
but then there is a doubt, and it makes in favor 
of himself. 


54 


LECTURES. 


Last year the Board of Equalization found 
a good many such cases of confusion, and man¬ 
aged to make several of them straight, but there 
was an honest statement of the reason why such 
returns had been made, which divested the case 
of its fraudulent intentions. 

II. THE CONSCIENCE SICK. 

If one wants to see a glaring inconsistency, 
let him see the valuation which a man puts 
upon his household effects when he lists them 
for taxation, and when he lists them for insur¬ 
ance. 

They are generally worth about four times as 
much in one case as in the other. There is no 
doubt that to replace them if destroyed would 
cost much more than they would sell for under 
the hammer, but the disproportion is too great. 
The inspection of the returns shows that the 
average value of all the horses in the county 
is about $60, of watches $30, and of pianos 
$108. The entire furniture in some houses is 
returned at a less figure than the duty paid at 
importation for a part of it. 

Now, consider such a case. A man buys 
damasks, carpets, linen, etc., abroad, swears to 
their valuation in the Custom House, puts them 


THE AUDITOR’S BOOKS. 


55 


into his house, and on his tax list as worth less 
than the duty, grouping them together with all 
he had before in the house. He has elegant 
plate, which cost $1,000, and would be worth 
$600 after passing through the melting pot; he 
returns it under one head, with all the rest, at 
$200. He has a horse which he could take 
down to Fifth street, and sell at any time for 
$150; he puts him down as worth $50. The 
Assessor and the Insurance Company inspect 
his house through the opposite ends of the field 
glass. To one everything is belittled and cheap¬ 
ened, to the other it is magnified and enriched. 
Self-interest triumphs over patriotism and hon¬ 
esty, and for the sake of a few dollars the man 
is content to sink in his own esteem and incur 
the pains and penalties of perjury. Look down 
the list of names and the amounts returned. 
Here is a millionaire, with only $1,500 worth 
of personal property, and yet his horses and 
carriages and household furniture, and taxable 
securities are included in it. The Auditor tells 
me that they estimate in the office that only 40 
per cent, of the personalty in the county gets 
on the tax duplicate. Sixty per cent, of it is 
untaxed in spite of the rigorous oath taken 
Besides this manifestation of diseased conscience 


56 


LECTURES. 


which so underrates all forms of property, there 
are innumerable ways of defrauding the revenue. 

Here is a man who has $15,000 deposited in 
bank on the day that he is to make out his re¬ 
turn. That is a taxable personalty. But he 
doesn’t pay any tax on it. He simply says to 
the cashier, “in greenbacks;” it is written so 
upon the book, and the greenback being un¬ 
taxed he escapes entirely. Or, he incurs a 
debt of large amount before listing, deducts it 
from his assets, and after listing has the fraud¬ 
ulent debt canceled. These last cases, I must 
say, though they are brought in under the 
head of a sick conscience, are pretty sure signs 
of its speedy death. It is so common and gen¬ 
eral to under-estimate the value of personal 
property, that there is no disguise in talking 
about it, and confessing it. I remember once a 
gentleman said to me, “No one puts down his 
effects at their valuation. Those bronzes, for 
instance, cost me $400, and I return them at 
$25.” Now, what is the defense of this kind 
of open fraud? It is found in a combination of 
specious pleas — that the tax is an odious one, 
that it is an unnecessary one, that the taxes are 
stolen and used up by the sworn custodians 
of them, and that no one will be the better or 


THE AUDITOR’S BOOKS. 


57 


wiser if I do pay the money or not. Undoubt¬ 
edly the rascality in official trusts, the embezzle¬ 
ments of, public funds, and the notorious 
corruption of the boards by whose votes the 
money is expended, have done much to make 
the public callous as to paying taxes honestly. 
Facts have so clearly proved that the vast sums 
raised for public benefit, stick to the hands of 
those who finger them, and that the city is dirty 
and badly sewered, and ill taught, and ill kept, 
while the money assessed to remedy these evils 
runs away and sinks into the sands, that a uni¬ 
versal disgust and moral apathy has come over 
people, and they hack, and cut, and prune at 
their tax list and against conscience; they swear 
it in and feel very little remorse. Now this is 
righting a wrong by a greater one. The pulpit 
must protest against any such doctrine. What¬ 
ever may become of the money, after it has 
been paid into the treasury it is the unquestion¬ 
able duty of every man to acquit his own con¬ 
science by a true and full payment. Because 
some men steal it after it is paid can not be a 
reason for any one to steal it before it is paid. 
Now, I put it to you as one of the hardest at¬ 
tacks upon religino, that men are able to run 
down a long list of tax returns after the Equal- 


LECTURES. 


58 

ization Board has struggled with them, and put 
the finger upon one after another church mem¬ 
ber whose return has been altered after his 
sworn oath as to its completeness. Last year 
that board found $359,960, personal property, 
not returned—that is to say, more than 1 per 
cent, of all the personal property returned from 
the entire county. And it was added in very 
large amounts, in sums from $1,000 up to 
$75,000. If there is any place where Christi¬ 
anity ought never to be exhibited, it is in the 
role of a criminal. And when Christian men 
allow their names to appear upon official lists, 
to be spoken of as dishonest or sharp, they in 
effect put their religion into the pillory and dis¬ 
grace it. When I go from place to place get¬ 
ting information for these lectures, oftentimes 
from men who care nothing for church or 
religion, and hear them say, “ Look at this case 
now, here is about as notorious a case as we 
have, and this man is very pious and never 
misses church, and is a pillar in some congre¬ 
gation,” the inconsistency staggers me, and I can 
see that mere preaching is never going to reform 
the world until it cures the diseased consciences 
in the pews. 

The world judges a religion by its fruits, and 


THE AUDITOR’S BOOKS. 


59 


when it produces anything like a crop of rotten 
tax returns and delinquent accounts and pro¬ 
tested notes, it soon loses its savor among 
men who know nothing else about it. 

There was a time in the history of the Church 
when the highest sacrifice a man could make 
for it, was to die for it. The martyrs went sing¬ 
ing to the torture and the fire. That era has 
passed away. The one thing that the same 
pure and holy cause is languishing for in our 
day, is for disciples who can live for it. 

Every religion counts its confessors and mar¬ 
tyrs. Great zeal makes a heroic death easy. 
But that religion whose influence is so pure and 
powerful that it enables men to fight the long 
campaign of our mortal life, and triumph in 
the end over the host of bad passions and evil 
temptations, so that at the close they may stand 
up in the words and consciousness of Samuel, 
is a divine force in the world. When the 
Church begins to fill up again with men who 
can stand with gray heads close to the opening 
curtain of another world, and looking all men 
in the face, ask with boldness: “ Behold, I 
am old and gray headed, and I have walked 
before you from my childhood unto this day, 
behold here I am; witness against me before 


6o 


LECTURES. 


the Lord, whose ox have I taken, or whose ass 
have I taken, or whom have I defrauded? 
Whom have I oppressed? Or, of whose hand 
have I received any bribe to blind mine eyes 
therewith?” When that time shall come we 
shall have a living religion and living Christians. 
Church registers preserve the names of pro¬ 
fessing Christians, but as no one would go to a 
tombstone to get an acurate notion of the 
character of the deceased, so the real register 
of real Christians must be made up from the 
many records of many men. It may be possible 
that a man who swears he has $50,000 less 
than other men can find for him, is honest and 
pious, but if he is, his friends ought to apply to 
the Probate Court in his behalf. If he doesn’t 
need a writ de inqtiirendo lunatico , his con¬ 
science is so relaxed that it is moribund. It 
may not be dead, but it is pretty sound asleep, 
and the chances are, that it will never rouse 
itself. 

III. DEAD AND BURIED CONSCIENCES. 

We now come to the last and most hopeless 
cases of fraud in this tax business. We pass 
into the company of men who make no pre¬ 
tence of a conscience. It has been amputated. 


THE AUDITOR'S BOOKS. 


61 


They have accustomed themselves to get along 
without it. Just as a man left an arm or leg at 
Shiloh or Bull Run, and has adapted himself to 
his shorter equipment, so some men look back 
over the past moral battlefields and find that 
they left their conscience before the enemy. 
No one battle did it. It was gradually shot away 
until there was so little stump left that they had 
the whole thing removed as a constant source 
of pain. And now they scarcely miss it. Now 
send such a man a tax list, and he looks at it as 
a challenge to his invention. Everybody knows 
he has a large property protected by the laws 
and he has to exert himself to find excuses for 
not paying his part of the expense of adminis¬ 
tering those laws. There are many ways. 
Money may be loaned on short paper or on 
paper maturing before April. He gets a good 
percentage, collects his principal, and goes out 
of the city when the Assessor is expected. He 
may have had $50,000 at interest most of the 
year, but he has no office, and can’t be found. 
The law protects his investments, but he does 
nothing to support the law. 

Of course he takes no oath, but he is morally 
foresworn, if not legally. Or he buys a good 
mortgage, has it made out in some domestic’s 


62 


LECTURES. 


name, and escapes taxation upon his capital in 
that way. Or he invests his money in an enter¬ 
prise out of the State, resides here and pays 
taxes nowhere. Or he happens to have all his 
means in untaxable bonds or greenbacks in 
April, and perjures himself to escape taxation 
upon the taxable personalty that bought them a 
little before. 

Or, last of all and simplest of all, he puts his 
securities away and simply ignores them when 
he takes the oath. How many Southern Rail¬ 
road bonds are held in this city, and how many 
of them pay taxes ? The city burdens itself to 
pay large interest to the bondholders; how 
much revenue does she get from them in the 
way of taxes? When she agreed to pay seven 
and three-tenths per cent, or six per cent., it 
was contemplated that the right to tax them 
would somewhat diminish the load. But is it 
generally believed that these bonds are returned 
at all on tax lists? Not at all. Men who buy 
a six per cent, taxable bond in a home market 
don’t contemplate paying nearly half of it for 
taxes. If they did, they wouldn’t buy it when 
they can get higher interest on government 
bonds which are safer and more easily con¬ 
vertible. Those bonds which are held in Cin- 


THE AUDITOR’S BOOK. 


63 


cinnati can not be honestly taxed and yet a good 
investment, and it is not an uncommon thing to 
hear men acknowledge that they wouldn’t have 
these bonds, if they had to list them. But what 
possible excuse have they for refusing? They 
are as clearly a part of their taxable effects as 
anything else they swear to. Never mind 
whether a corporation has a right to tax its 
own debts or not, the simple question for you 
and me is, shall I swear to a lie to save a few 
dollars? Suppose some one of you owns a 
couple of these bonds, the tax on them would 
be between $50 and $60. Now is the amount 
saved a sufficient balm for the injury of a per¬ 
jured soul? Could you on simply worldly prin¬ 
ciples spend $50 better than in buying your 
own peace and esteem? Let any man who 
shall be tempted in a few weeks to make a false 
return for taxation hesitate before he raises 
his hand and calls God to witness his crime. 
Let him think, let him reason with himself, let 
him fall into the struggle of Shakespeare’s Jew, 
and rescue from their basilar level the words 
which he degraded: 

“ An oath, an oath ; 

I have an oath in heaven, 

Shall I lay perjury upon my soul? 

No, not for Venice. 


6 4 


LECTURES. 


Put before you the entire matter. On the one 
hand the small profit, on the other the loss of 
your soul. Let the crime sear itself into the 
eyeballs of your moral nature. Be sure it is not 
less a crime because it is a common one, and 
that it is not overlooked by God because men 
do not ferret it out. Call the crime by its right 
name, theft and perjury. How the grand old 
voice of Master Latimer speaks eternal truth! 
More than three hundred years ago, he spoke 
to men just such as we are, and he spoke on 
this very subject. The Court and Parliament 
assembled at Stamford to hear him preach. 
Hear his words : “When the Parliament, 
the High Court of this realm, is gathered 
together and there it is determined that every 
man shall pay a fifteenth part of his goods 
to the King, then Commissioners come forth, 
and he that in sight of men, in his corn, 
cattle, sheep, and other goods, is worth 
an hundred pounds, will set himself at ten 
pounds. He will be worth to the King but 
ten pounds. Tell me now whether this be 
theft or no?” And again, two years later, he 
says : “ And this I speak because I fear this 
realm is full of thieves. For he is a thief 
who withdraws anything from any man, whoso- 


THE AUDITOR’S BOOKS. 


65 


ever he is. Now I put the case that it is 
allowed by Parliament, by common authority 
that the King shall have one shilling of every 
pound, and there are certain men appointed in 
every shire who are valuers. If I either corrupt 
the value or swear against my conscience, that 
I am not worth £100, when I am worth £200, 
I am a thief before God, and shall be hanged 
for it in hell. Now how many thieves think 
you are there in England who will not be 
valued above £10, when they are worth £100? 
But this is a pitiful thing, and God will punish 
them one day, for God’s matters are not to be 
trifled with.” Time and fire consumed that 
great preacher centuries ago. But all the fire 
that lurks in every atom of created matter shall 
not, in all the ages, so much as scorch the living 
truths he spoke. Over the chasm that separates 
his day from ours his clarion voice repeats in 
the ears of sinful men that same blunt, soul- 
searching question that made men tremble in 
Stamford Church. “ How many thieves, think 
you, are there in this realm who will not be 
valued above ten pounds when they are worth 
an hundred.” 


5 


Street Car Life in Cincinnati. 


Everybody rides on the street cars at times, 
and everybody knows that there are conductors 
and drivers, and horses attached to those cars. 
In fact, there are no laboring people against 
whom we are so constantly jostled as these 
men who live on two square feet of platform at 
the ends of street cars. We get on every day, 
pay our fares, get off, scold and vilify the con¬ 
ductor if he don’t do exactly as we want, iden¬ 
tify him and the driver with the company, and 
express our elegant contempt of the monopoly in 
warm terms to the monopolized employe. Very 
few people know anything about the routine life 
of these public servants. Of course we know 
that they take tickets, and strike a bell, and punch 
a trip-slip. There isn’t any doubt about that. 
We all see that much of it and pay no more at¬ 
tention to it than we do to the clock which is 
always ticking when we look at it. No one is 
surprised that the clock is ticking when he 



STREET CAR LIFE. 


67 


glances at it. It is its business. That is what it 
is for. No one is surprised to see the conductor 
come for his fare. That is what he is for, and we 
pay it without looking at him, and with no more 
consideration of him than if he was an automatic 
machine. And, under the present system, that 
is about what he is. If we could only find some 
kind of a ticket-taking machine that could 
count, and make change, and stand all kinds of 
contempt and keep up a perpetual smile, and be 
polite, and not eat anything, and not want any 
time to do it, and know the names of all the 
streets and the people that live on them, and be 
not seized with ordinary human propensities, 
such as the want of pay, and the desire of taking 
care of self and family, and of having a friend 
or two in the world, and a minute to chat with 
him, or the disposition once in a while, to know 
what is inside of a book, and to launch out a 
few fathoms into the sea of human interests that 
roars around the car, why then we should have 
the final result which the present system of con¬ 
ducting street rail roads is apparently striving to 
produce. During the five years that I have been 
in this city, it has been my pleasure to meet and 
know many of the street car employes in all 
parts of the city. I have met them, talked with 


68 


LECTURES. 


them, and made it my business to find out what 
kind of a life they lead. If there is any one 
thing that I, as a disciple of Galton, am glad of, it 
is that among other virtue or vices which I have 
inherited, is a tendency to ask questions. It is 
a splendid failing. When a man sets out to help 
other people, or teach other people, perhaps 
there is no better way to begin than by asking 
them what they want to know and what they 
want done. And if, as members of a living re¬ 
ligion, and of a sympathetic Christ, we really 
want to do some good to suffering humanity, the 
only way to do it is to come out of ourselves 
and our easy chairs, go and find the people, and 
ask them what they want. There is a modesty 
in human suffering and misery. They are weak¬ 
nesses, and few worthy people care to voluntarily 
acknowledge weaknesses. But a single sympa¬ 
thetic question may open a floodgate of informa¬ 
tion. I knew a shoemaker once who went for 
thirty years from his house to his shop, and was 
never known to ask a question or observe an 
object, and he was no more useful in the world 
than his awl. Every day he was stuck into his 
shop, and every night he was pulled out again, un¬ 
til he wore out. This lack of inquiry lies at the 
bottom of a good deal of lack of doing. Men 


STREET CAR LIFE. 


6 9 


don’t relieve misery because they are not aware 
of it. They are not aware of it because they 
are so wrapped up in their own affairs that they 
don’t make any inquiries about the affairs of 
others. Here is a great duty of the pulpit, 
whose business is humanity, to find out cases of 
suffering and hardship, and lay the facts before 
people in such a way as to stimulate thought 
and create a more intelligent public sentiment. 
Now my subject to-night is not one of great 
misery and destitution, like that of the tenement 
houses, but it is one of great interest to many 
people of whose life and hardships we do not 
know. As far as I can find out there are no 
men so much overworked, so poorly paid, and 
such complete machines as the street car em¬ 
ployes. Let us take a glance into their life and 
see if this isn’t so. 

I. ARE THEY OVERWORKED? 

The answer to that question will depend upon 
what we consider the possibilities of the human 
organism for consecutive labor. Twelve hours 
used to be a legal day’s work. Ten hours is 
now the maximum, and there is a decided ten¬ 
dency to exact even less than this, on the ground 
that the good of society as well as of the toiler, 


70 


LECTURES. 


requires more time for mental, social, aesthetic 
and religious duties. But there is not in Cin¬ 
cinnati, a single conductor or driver who works 
less than twelve hours every day, and on the 
great majority of the lines, the day means fifteen 
hours. On the consolidated routes the time 
varies with the length of the road, but it never 
falls below fifteen hours steady labor, and on 
some of them it reaches seventeen hours. On 
each of the cars that cross the river there is 
only one man, who acts as conductor and driver, 
and he works seventeen hours every day. On 
Vine street the day is sixteen hours long. Now 
let us digest these facts. A man who gets up at 
7 o’clock in the morning, and gets down to busi¬ 
ness at 7^ o’clock thinks he has done a fair 
day’s work when he gets back to his family at 
6 o’clock in the evening, and so he has. No 
man ought to be driven longer than that. But 
the conductor who takes his ticket at 7 o’clock 
in the morning has been at work an hour already, 
we will say, stands all day long on the same 
platform, takes his ticket at 6 o’clock in the 
evening again, and, if he be on the Consolidated 
lines, takes the last ticket between 9 and 10 
o’clock, and if he has fallen under the sterner 
decrees of fate, and is cooped up on a Newport 


STREET CAR LIFE. 


71 


or Vine street car, he runs on until 11 o’clock. 
It takes a very high order of mathematical 
genius to subtract seventeen hours from twenty- 
four and leave more than seven, or fifteen from 
twenty-four and leave more than nine. And 
even Benjamin Franklin, who entertained high 
ideas of wakefulness, conceded that under cer¬ 
tain contingences, seven hours sleep, was right 
and proper. When a man works seventeen hours 
for his employer and sleeps seven for himself^ 
and does this day after day and night after night, 
it becomes proper to ask what time he finds to 
read, to instruct himself and his children, to 
amuse himself, to qualify himself for the duties 
which God has imposed upon him as a citizen, 
father, husband, and Christian. As long as this 
lasts, it is demonstrated with mathematic ac¬ 
curacy, that a man can not serve-God and Mam¬ 
mon, for Mammon never lets him go until he 
falls asleep. I know a conductor in the city 
who was so unfortunate as to lose his wife some 
time ago, and found himself left with the care of 
four children, the oldest of whom was nine years 
of age. Every morning he was compelled to 
leave those children under the charge of this 
oldest one, go to his car, run in hastily for five 
minutes at noon, and then see them no more 


72 


LECTURES. 


until he came home at 9 o’clock in the evening, 
and found them in bed and asleep. And it was 
one of the saddest things in the world to see 
these little things, as I often did, lock their door 
at night and lower the key from the window for 
their father to find when he came home. There 
they slept, under the care of the Heavenly 
Father, in their locked room, while the only 
earthly protector that they had was treading up 
and down on that treadmill of his daily life. 
The conscience of mankind revolts from such 
excessive demands, even when every moment is 
amply paid for. The experience of man teaches 
that it is against public policy to permit any class 
of labor to be strained and brutalized by exces¬ 
sive application. And it does not at all affect 
this truth, that there are dozens of men and 
hundreds of men ready and willing to take these 
positions and to do all the work. Political 
economy does not put men into the same cate¬ 
gory with other supplies. Human nerves, and 
muscles, and affections are not to be bought 
and worked up into a fabric, like so much 
coal, and cotton, and iron. There is an 
eternal difference between a whirling spindle or 
a descending trip-hammer and the men who 
guide it, and it is not accordant with any law, 


STREET CAR LIFE. 


73 


human or divine, that because thousands of men 
are out of work and ready to do anything to get 
it, any one of them may be compelled to do the 
work of two men. When a man rents a machine, 
he has a right to get all the work from it he can, 
even if it wears out in his service. When he 
rents a man , he rises above machines, and it is 
not the man’s extremity of need which should 
gauge his demands, but his capacity and endur¬ 
ance. It is “ not his poverty, but his will,” that 
is the standard. 

No. We may talk largely about scarcity and 
surplusage of human labor, of the laws of de¬ 
mand and supply, of hundreds who are stand¬ 
ing ready to do this same amount of work, and 
after all it does not prove anything, except that 
there is vast destitution, and that men must feed 
themselves and their families somehow. It does 
not prove at all that men have any right to take 
advantage of such necessities to get double work 
and killing work out of their men. Augustus 
Caesar said it was better to be Herod’s hog than 
his son, because his religion forbade his killing 
his hog and it didn’t prevent his killing his son. 
Perhaps it might be said now, it is better to be 
a horse than a man in the street car service, for 
they relieve the horses from the excessive de- 


74 


LECTURES 


mands which they impose on the men. Horses 
are not so plenty, but that it costs something 
when they break down. But men , why, there 
are hundreds want these places 3 work them. 
But you will notice that it is not merely physical 
overwork of which these men may complain. 
It is the entire extinction of all their natural 
functions. Work is a condition of life in its 
normal condition. If any man won’t work, 
neither shall he eat, said St. Paul, and we gen¬ 
erally agree to it except in the case of the tramp. 
But how is it when work, instead of being a 
means of life, becomes life itself* when, instead 
of fitting man to enjoy life and prevent its be¬ 
coming monotonous, it, itself, is the be-all and 
end-all of one’s life ? So that, in the morning, 
there is nothing to sweeten the labor by antici¬ 
pating its rewards and the hour of domestic 
comfort. That old maxim is good sound 
'sense, that if man will not work when he has 
the chance, he shall not eat. But what kind of 
sense is there in the present rule as to con¬ 
ductors and drivers, that those who do work, 
and work fifteen hours at that, shall not have 
time to eat? For there isn’t a street car com¬ 
pany in the city that gives its men a dinner 
hour, or makes any provisions for such a thing,. 


STREET CAR LIFE. 


75 


except the Main street line, which has more 
humane provisions that any other, and puts a 
third man on in the place of each employe, 
giving him a half hour for meals. As a Mt. 
Auburn man, I am glad this can be truly said of 
this road, on which we especially have to travel. 

The others take the horses out to feed them, 
but the men must make some arrangement 
among themselves to get off the car as it nears 
the end of the route, rush into some place, 
eat their dinner, and be ready to catch the 
car again as it comes around, under penalty 
of dismissal. Many take their baskets with 
them and eat dinner and supper (if there be 
any use of distinguishing them) on the car in 
the sight of the passengers. The longest time 
any conductor or driver has to leave his car for 
dinner, so far as I can find by inquiry on differ¬ 
ent lines, is fifteen minutes. On the Vine street 
line they get nine minutes. That is to say, this 
company permits the men to have half as many 
minutes for meals as they work hours in the 
day, if it can be called a permit, for the com¬ 
panies make no account of the matter them¬ 
selves. The cars run as usual, and the men 
may snatch the time if they can, but the time 
table is not adjusted for them. Foreigners have 


76 


LECTURES. 


laughed a good deal at the twenty minute din¬ 
ners which our railroads allow their passengers, 
but it is not a laughing matter when men are 
compelled to bolt their meals, day after day, in 
a space of time hardly long enough to see what 
they have. 

The constancy and length of their service 
each day extinguishes all social and domestic 
life. They haven’t any. The place where a 
man spends fifteen hours every day, in summer 
and winter, every minute he has, except when 
he is asleep, may be called his home. 

These men live on the cars. When they go 
to their beds, at the close of so long a labor, 
how much do you think they are inclined, or 
able, to study or read, or talk, or be amused ? 

All that splendid part of their life is as com¬ 
pletely wiped out as if a wet sponge had passed 
over it. Most other laborers have time to eat 
their dinner decently and with some regard to 
their physical welfare; they have the evening 
with their families, and for social intercourse 
and amusement and instruction. They don’t 
work on Sundays, and enjoy that day of rest. 
But the car men go to business while men are 
sleeping, and go home when they are asleep 
again. 


STREET CAR LIFE. 


77 


2. ARE THEY UNDERPAID ? 

The consolidated roads pay their conductors 
$i 75 a day, and their drivers $i 50. For an 
ordinary day’s wages in a responsible position 
that would not be very good pay, even in these 
days of cheap labor. But these prices are paid 
for one-half more labor than other men give. 
The man who breaks stone on the road for ten 
hours, doing the simplest and most primitive 
kind of labor, where only brute strength is re¬ 
quired, gets $1 a day. But these wages are 
higher than are paid on some other lines. That 
Newport road is a monumental instance. 
There, as I said, one man has the entire charge 
of the car, acting as conductor and driver, runs 
seventeen hours, and is paid $1 50 per day, 
which is a little under nine cents an hour. 
Compare these wages and these excessive hours 
and demands with the wages of common house 
servants. Three, three and a half, and four 
dollars are not unusual wages, together with 
room and board. On some of the cars con¬ 
ductors get four dollars a week, and run twelve 
hours, and have all their expenses to meet. 
And no house servant would stay an hour where 
she was compelled to devote every minute of 
time to work, and had no opportunity to 


?8 


LECTURES. 


eat and improve herself in social and mental 
and religious occupations. The wages are too 
small for the duties done, for the hardships un¬ 
dergone to earn it. There ought to be a dis¬ 
tinction in the price of renting a man and buy¬ 
ing him. 

And then another complaint which I make in 
behalf of these men is, that they are subjected 
to a degree of ignominious suspicion, surveil¬ 
lance, watching and examination that would 
prevent even a savings bank from stealing its 
depositors’ money. Every man of them is pre¬ 
sumed to be a thief and scoundrel, and they are 
encouraged to fidelity and extra zeal for their 
employers’ interest by an ingenious set of checks 
and counts, and bells and punches, which say to 
them all the time, “We know that you are try¬ 
ing to steal that five cent piece. Sound that 
bell. Ladies and gentlemen, look at him. 
There stands a man who is such a thief and ras¬ 
cal that we can’t trust him, although we have 
more of his money deposited with us than he 
is ever likely to have of ours.” 

For, bless your souls, this service is at such 
a premium that no man can get even a sub- 
conductorship without a regular car, and, per¬ 
haps, without any work at all for days and 


STREET CAR LIFE. 


79 


weeks, he can’t even be among those “who 
also serve, but only stand and wait,” unless he 
can deposit $50 in money at the office of the 
Consolidated Company. For this deposit, upon 
which he gets no interest, he receives the privi¬ 
lege of carrying a bell-punch, hired by the com¬ 
pany, to keep his hands from picking and steal¬ 
ing, and his tongue from evil speaking and 
lying, though it is not communicated to him 
thus in printed copies of the Catechism. After 
he has deposited $10 more for his tickets and 
equipments, he is allowed to go out to his 
fifteen hours’ work, his $1 75 wages, and his 
restless, dinnerless, supperless fatigues. Why 
is it that the Consolidated Company requires so 
heavy a cash deposit from its employes ? What 
other company holds so large an amount of de¬ 
posit without paying for the use of it? John 
Shillito & Co. employ a very large force of em¬ 
ployes, much larger than the Consolidated Com¬ 
pany; they take them into responsible positions, 
where a large amount of firm property is con¬ 
stantly exposed to them; but I don’t hear that 
that firm compels a cash deposit of $50, or any 
number of dollars, from those working for 
them. Fifty dollars is a very large amount of 
money to any man who has to work fifteen 


So 


LECTURES. 


hours for $i 75, and it must occasion very 
great distress to some of them to scrape to¬ 
gether so much from the narrow circumstances 
of their domestic life. And what right has the 
company to keep money without some interest 
or bonus paid ? 

There are about a hundred conductors in the 
employ of the company, and they furnish the 
company a perpetual loan of $50 each, or 
$5,000. It doesn’t make any difference whether 
the company uses the money or lets it lie in its 
vaults. These men who need the use of the 
money are deprived of it without any compen¬ 
sation. Five thousand dollars is not a large 
amount of money compared with the expenses 
of the company, but it is enough to pay the 
wages of all the conductors on the road for just 
about a month, and if the company invested the 
amount in 4 per cent, bonds of the denomina¬ 
tion of $50, it would earn $200 to divide among 
the owners of them. A deposit is large or 
small in proportion to the means of him that 
makes it, and I suppose that in the majority of 
cases the conductors have more difficulty in 
raising this $50 cash than Mr. Springer has in 
paying the great sums which his large heart and 
benevolent purpose are constantly impelling him 


STREET CAR LIFE. 


8 l 


to give to the city in which we live. For con¬ 
sider that the men who seek these positions 
must, in the nature of things, be unable to get 
work, and unable to remain idle. Their neces¬ 
sity compels them to go to work at once to get 
bread for their families and themselves. 

Don’t you suppose that $50 cash is almost a 
fortune to these men, and that many of them 
have to borrow at high interest, or pawn or sell 
the household articles to make up the amount? 
I know a good many people in comfortable cir¬ 
cumstances who may not think this so hard, and 
yet would find it very unpleasant to advance 
that amount themselves, without anticipating 
some of their income. I don’t know how it 
may be in other professions, but I imagine that 
among the 70,000 clergymen in this country, 
whose average salary is $2 a day, there might 
be a great many more vacant parishes than there 
are, if every call from a church required a de¬ 
posit of $50 cash, and I am not sure but in the 
court house and colleges we might find some 
lawyers and physicians whom such a demand 
might temporarily embarrass. 

So the substance of this complaint is that the 
company does not treat these men as men. 
They do not show them ordinary confidence. 

6 


82 


LECTURES. 


They do not diminish the tremendous strain of 
the work by stimulating the nobler instincts of the 
workers. Every kind of commercial enterprise 
coheres only by some degree of mutual confi¬ 
dence. The statutes of trusts are good to ap¬ 
peal to, but behind them there lies the broad, 
universal common law of trust. Any man em¬ 
ploying others has a right to introduce such - a 
system of books and accounts as to prevent loss 
to himself, and insure accurate returns of his 
business, but when the commercial world re¬ 
solves itself into a mutual detective organi¬ 
zation and invents all kinds of new machines 
for watching and tracking the course of a coin, 
we shan’t have much self-respect left in busi¬ 
ness. And, as a matter of fact, the conductors 
on street cars do feel the indignity of their 
treatment so much that when the bell-punch 
was introduced many left the service, and the 
great majority of them are utterly indifferent to 
the interests of their employers. I remember 
one of them said to me some time ago, “ I don’t 
think I ever felt any inclination to steal ; my 
accounts have always been correct, but under 
this system, if I ever get ahead of the company, 
I don’t think I should be very scrupulous.” I 
don’t endorse the morals of the observation, but 


STREET CAR LIFE. 


83 


I thoroughly sympathized with the feeling that 
inspired it. When the harrow goes through a 
man’s nature so thoroughly as to break up all 
self-respect, it can’t leave much zeal and re¬ 
sponsibility. Substitute clock-work of your own 
devising for the conscience of your employe, 
and the conscience will be pretty apt to think 
its occupation gone, and feel no pang when it 
sees your clock-work fail to register truly. 
Perhaps when the inventive age has culminated, 
we may find that the truest bond between em¬ 
ployer and employed, the most thorough safe¬ 
guard of fiduciary interests, is in the noble and 
manly reliance upon the sense of honor and 
duty stimulated and developed by kindness, 
courtesy, identity of interest in success, and due 
regard for the feelings and necessities of each 
other. It isn’t denied that this confidence would 
be misplaced at times, and that losses would re¬ 
sult, but so they do now in spite of all checks, 
and I am not prepared to admit that a society in 
which all men are supposed to be scoundrels is 
preferable to one where the presumption is the 
other way. 

But I would not have you think that I have 
blindly defended the cause of these people with¬ 
out knowing anything as to the ability and 


8 4 


LECTURES. 


willingness of the companies to improve their 
hard life. Because a man has to work hard, it 
does not follow that he is oppressed. 

I do not confuse hardship with injustice, and 
a corporation with tyranny. 

I am perfectly aware that men who invest 
money in an enterprise expect some return for 
it, and I was careful to detail these facts as to 
the lives of the company’s employes to the 
president of the company, Mr. Shoemaker, to 
Col. Bullock, the ex-President, and to the Super¬ 
intendent, that I might know the other side of 
the question. 

And just as I supposed, it was the old strug¬ 
gle renewed in the minds of the company, be¬ 
tween interest and humanity. These facts, I 
was told, had been thoroughly canvassed, and 
everyone was ready to acknowledge the hard¬ 
ship, but then the company had to pay the men 
from its earnings and couldn’t afford to pay any 
more. The old law proposition that corpora¬ 
tions have no souls, if it be carried further than 
a mere suggestion of their immunity from 
the pains of death, and be made to intimate that 
they have no feelings and sensibilities, is not 
true. There is vast mischief in looking at great 
corporations and teaching people to look at 


STREET CAR LIFE. 


85 


them as though they were automatic, and not 
controlled by men of human hearts and affec¬ 
tions. 

It is true that as the interests become magni¬ 
fied, more have to be consulted, and where there 
are a thousand of stockholders who derive a liv¬ 
ing from the corporate earnings, they have to be 
regarded by the managers, and the expense must 
be so arranged, as to make the earnings as large 
as possible. But I have met many directors of 
large companies, employing many men and I 
have always found, as I find in this case, that 
they see the suffering, and would like to relieve 
it, but can’t make up their minds to pass a divi¬ 
dend. 

Now, what are the facts which the officers of 
the Consolidated Company give as the reason of 
the company’s present time table and wages? 
They say they can not possibly employ more 
men, nor pay more money. 

The gross earnings of the company last year 
were $530,000, and the capital is $2,325,000. 
That is to say, the company earned 16 % per 
cent, of its capital invested, or said to be in¬ 
vested. Out of this sum they had to pay $28,000 
interest on their debts, and the balance was ex¬ 
pended on current expenses and the annual 


86 


LECTURES. 


dividend. The expenses of the company for 
every purpose during the year were $367,000, 
of which $120,000 were paid to conductors and 
drivers. The stockholders received about the 
same amount, $120,000, or a little over 5 per 
cent. Men are supposed to know about what 
they earn and spend during the year, and it will 
be seen at a glance at these figures that there 
must be some balance remaining to the credit of 
some fund, probably a fund for the redemption 
of the company’s bonds outstanding. This 
difference of $43,000 between the gross receipts 
and gross expenses is something considerable, 
and the simple item of expense charged to the 
interest account $28,000, would be enough to 
employ one-third more men thus reducing the 
days’ work to ten hours for each man. But, 
even supposing all the money earned, every 
dollar, was needed to pay the current expenses 
and this dividend, so that there should be no sur¬ 
plus of any kind. Yet it must be borne in mind 
that this capital stock on which dividends are 
paid represents, not the actual cost of the routes, 
but the amount at which their owners valued 
them when they came into the combination, and 
this valuation was, in some cases, so excessive 
that the treaty nearly failed. I use the lan¬ 
guage of the President of the company when I 


STREET CAR LIFE. 


87 


say that the money invested is not more than is 
represented by the present quotation of the 
stock, say sixty cents on the dollar. So that the 
modest little dividend of 5 per cent, becomes 
really a dividend of 8 y£ per cent, free of taxes. 
That may be considered a pretty good invest¬ 
ment, in days when money is daily turning by 
the millions into 4 per cent, bonds, because there 
is no better place to put it, and when there 
is nothing, bond, mortgage, note or lease, that 
honestly pays more than 6 per cent, when it has 
been taxed. The stockholders of the Consoli¬ 
dated Company, of course, feel as every one 
does in the same circumstances, that they don’t 
get any too much, but it is clear that they get a 
far more generous share of the earnings than 
they ought to, while their service is so hard and 
oppressive. While writing this I have received 
a letter from one of the best and most trusted 
conductors in the service of the company that 
speaks for itself. He says: “I ask you to try 
and find me some other employment. I want 
to be at home in the evenings with my family, 
and I have only had one Sunday in twelve 
months to myself, and can never go inside a 
church,” and then he goes on to specify what he 
is able to do. 

Now, if this man had asked, the company 


88 


LECTURES. 


says, he might have had every Sunday. So he 
might, but while he rested he would have 
starved. The wages of six days were just 
enough to keep himself and family six days, 
and the seventh found his children as hungry 
as the others. The divine ordinance contem¬ 
plated that six days’ work should furnish seven 
days’ food, and hence did not enact that hunger 
and other human necessities should cease to 
work upon that day. “ Six days shalt thou 
labor and do all that thou hast to do,” was the 
command. But for these men, it reads: “ Seven 
days shalt thou labor to do all that the company 
has to do.” If the company were willing to 
take upon their investment a fair average inter¬ 
est for the use of their money—such an interest 
as most persons would be glad to get, they 
might easily pay fair average wages to their 
men, reduce their hours, and give them oppor¬ 
tunity to live like human beings. The differ¬ 
ence which would be made by paying $20,000 
to the employes instead of to the stockholders, 
would be to two hundred men the difference 
between hunger and plenty, between prostration 
and elasticity of strength, between the toil that 
kills, and the labor that strengthens, between a 
life of servitude, and a life of self-respecting, 
free, and joyful service. 


STREET CAR LIFE. 


89 


From the point of observation where the pul¬ 
pit stands, the consideration of everything else 
than the humane and social aspect of such cases 
is not necessary. Perhaps, it may be said to do 
its duty when it points out cases of hardship 
and sufferings in men’s dealing with men. But 
it is so easy, when such cases have been shown, 
to answer by pleading inability to remedy the 
matter, that sometimes it becomes a duty not 
only to show the evil, but also the way to cure it. 

And at the bottom of all the evils of society, 
where men are buying and selling and striving 
to live together by mutually meeting demand 
with supply, lies the fundamental human instinct 
which the Gospel strives to break down and kill 
— that of selfishness. The divine beauty and 
necessity of sacrifice is certainly one of the 
great lessons which humanity learned from Cal¬ 
vary, and the power of Jesus Christ manifests 
itself in the world, or ought to manifest itself, 
by inducing men to relinquish their superfluities 
to the necessities of those who help them earn 
them. If some man wants to preach a sermon 
which shall make him famous, let him rise in 
the directories to which he may belong, and re¬ 
fuse to take a dividend, wrung from the nerves, 
and brain, and soul of the company’s employes. 


9 o 


LECTURES. 


A few sermons of that kind would make splen~ 
did reading and hasten the day when the human¬ 
ity of the race will, to a certain extent, eradi¬ 
cate the greed of the race. I say again, that I 
hope I shall not be counted among those who 
set up a cry against a corporation simply be¬ 
cause it is strong and has no competition. So 
far as the citizens at large are concerned in this 
matter of the city railroad ordinance, it is un¬ 
questionably true, as Col. Bullock has said, that 
we are carried more cheaply in this city than 
the people of other cities are. No one objects 
to the price charged on the Consolidated road, 
and the people at large are willing that the rail¬ 
roads shall be properly treated. But they are 
undoubtedly open upon their own confession, 
to the charge of inhumanity and neglect toward 
their employes. When everything has been 
said for and against, there still stand those fearful 
facts, that there are men working steadily for 
them, day after day, week after week, sixteen 
hours every day, for an average of $1.62, that 
they have no confidence shown them, no time for 
meals, no promotion, no family life, no intel¬ 
lectual life, nothing to distinguish them from 
the brutes that pull the cars. 


“The Betrayal of a City. 


I propose to bring before you to-night some 
plain facts as to the city in which we live, and 
as to the cause which lies behind them. I make 
no apology for using the pulpit in an attack 
upon municipal maladministration, for I remem¬ 
ber that it has been consecrated to the use of 
human society and good government by its 
most brilliant orators. Those who have been 
the most powerful preachers of divine mysteries 
have been most eloquent and earnest in denun¬ 
ciation of official corruption and crime in the 
society of their day. When Elijah spoke, Ahab 
trembled. When John the Baptist changed his 
utterance from the coming kingdom of God, to 
the present kingdom of Herod, he did not think 
himself chargeable with neglect of duty. When 
Paul, in the same letters in which he declared 
himself forgetful of everything but a crucified 
Savior, turned aside to an awful indictment of 



92 


LECTURES. 


the society of his day, when Chrysostom made 
the arches of St. Sophia ring with the story of 
wickedness, and directed the eyes of the throng 
to Eutropius clinging to the altar for protection 
from the city he had wronged; when Ambrose 
raised his crosier against Theodosius; when 
Bernard directed the conscience of Kings; when 
Bossuet before court and King, rebuked court 
and King; when John Knox stood alone, but 
more powerful than crown and nobility, in the 
Castle of Stirling — there was no timid utter¬ 
ance by men outside their official privileges. 

The pulpit never has had, never can have, 
any narrower conception of its spirit than the 
old Roman slave had of his when he refused to 
“ consider anything that belonged to humanity 
as alien to himself.” There is a time when the 
voice of the people really swells into the voice 
of God. 

I. First, then, it is perfectly clear that the city 
of Cincinnati is to-day in an abominable con¬ 
dition. I am not speaking now, and shall not 
speak, in any other way than as a citizen. I lay 
aside the question of religion, as much as it can 
be laid aside, and speak now only as any man 
may, who has a family and home, and interests 
in this city. I say it is in an abominable con- 


THE BETRAYAL OF A CITY. 


93 


dition. In every way. We spend every year 
three cents on every dollar that we own to 
secure the advantages of good government and 
protection in our health, and in pursuit of happi¬ 
ness. In return for it, we have a city as badly 
sewered, as badly lighted, as badly cleaned, 
and as badly governed, as any city on the conti¬ 
nent. It reminds us of Dr. Johnson’s gentle 
compliment upon the roast that was served him 
for his money, “ It is ill-kept, ill-killed, ill-cooked 
and ill-served. But the sanitary condition of 
the city, important as it is in influence upon the 
health, and necessarily upon the morality of the 
people inhabiting it, is not so much my object 
now as the moral condition itself. 

Within the last ten years there has been a 
vast impetus given to municipal pride by the 
splendid benefactions of its rich men. It is a 
thing to be proud of, that in one and the same city 
there should be so many men willing to beautify, 
adorn, and amuse the place of their business 
prosperity. But the succession of these splen¬ 
did gifts has had the effect of inflating the muni¬ 
cipal conceit to such an extent that it has be¬ 
come a mania with us that there is no other 
place but Cincinnati, and it must be so freed 
from all restraints, and made so attractive to 


94 


LECTURES. 


everybody that there will be continual streams 
of visitors to behold its wonders. It is con¬ 
stantly advertised as a curiosity shop. If any¬ 
one suggests that a certain bad custom better be 
changed, there comes up the whisper, “ Don’t 
touch that, it will hurt the brewers or some 
other great class, and they have ever so many 
millions of invested capital here.” Well, where 
did they make their capital but here? But 
there are hundreds of thousands who shall visit 
the city and carry away free advertisements of 
this great industry, and we must not say a word. 
When Dickens was here, in 1842, he said our 
great fault was in forgetting everything else but 
making money. At first glance, it would seem 
that we had lost that ambition in the other ex¬ 
treme of seeking amusement, but we have not. 
We want to make this the Paris of America, 
because it will 'pay. Behind all the boasting as 
to our aesthetic condition and taste, the real argu¬ 
ment that draws subscriptions to any aesthetic 
scheme is —it will pay. We have a great 
Music Hall, a splendid benefaction and monu¬ 
ment which shall long be vocal with the praises 
of him who made it possible, but when subscrip¬ 
tions were asked to finish it, there was only one 
real argument: These festivals will draw thou- 


THE BETRAYAL OB’ A CITY. 


95 


sands of dollars to the business of the city. It 
is not a donation you will make; it is an invest¬ 
ment. So with the Expositions, so with the 
Art School, so with everything that we publish 
to the world as indicative of our advanced cul¬ 
ture and aesthetic tastes — there is the thin ve¬ 
neering on the surface, and underneath, the 
same shabby and overwhelming desire for 
money. Whatever the few may think of these 
refining influences, it is undoubtedly true that 
to the city at large, they are valuable as great 
advertisements. Probably no man in the city 
will speak more enthusiastically of the musical 
culture of the city than the peanut vender beside 
the Music Hall; not because he knows the 
difference between the “ Creation” and the 
“ Grand Dutchess,” but because it enabled him 
to sell so many more pints of peanuts. Rise 
from him, through retail and wholesale business 
men, and you have the “Spirit of Cincinnati” 
as it really is. We have made vast strides to¬ 
ward culture, but the tastes of a great city can 
not be refined in a day. 

But the result of this sudden mania for draw¬ 
ing people has resulted in a gradual change of 
all the moral conditions of the city. First, the 
Sunday ordinances went, because there were 


p6 


LECTURES. 


many visitors on Sunday who might want to 
purchase, and who would want to amuse them¬ 
selves. Then, many new kinds of attractions, 
before not permitted, began to multiply. The 
inclined planes made it possible, and it was a 
great blessing for thousands to spend an hour 
in the country, and so they must have places to 
go. Variety shows blossomed out everywhere. 
Gin palaces opened their elegant doors to catch 
this golden stream of visitors, this many bil¬ 
lowed Pactolus. Red lights flared out from 
many stairways where the law closed the door, 
and the reckless hand of the gambler opened it. 
Houses of prostitution became infamously nu¬ 
merous and infamously bold, and, to-day, Cin¬ 
cinnati is the worst city on the continent, ac¬ 
cording to the testimony of those who ought to 
know. Said a St. Louis gambler, recently, 
“ Gambling is about driven out of St. Louis 
and everywhere else, except in Cincinnati. 
Here is our best place.” We have gained a 
reputation for this unparalleled immorality 
throughout the land. 

II And when we go back to the facts in the 
case and ask how has this change come about, 
we find that the municipal laws are really the 
same, with the exception of the Sunday ordi- 


THE BETRAYAL OF A CITY. 


97 


nance repealed, that they were twenty years ago. 
All the authority which kept the city compara¬ 
tively decent is now possessed by the munici¬ 
pal government. Don’t let us for a moment im¬ 
agine that the city is lawless, because the im¬ 
moral shows and entertainments are lawful. 
Not at all; the ordinances on the city statute- 
book referring to entertainments are just as ex¬ 
plicit, in the same language, as they were in 
1850. 

There is no need of legislation. It is not a 
question what we want the law-making power 
to do. The people have already expressed 
themselves as to the laws. They stand there 
to-day and are amply sufficient to accomplish 
the purification of this city. It does not make 
a particle of difference whether the enforcement 
of those laws make Cincinnati a Puritan city or 
a Sodom; while they stand unrepealed they 
must be executed. This divine right, which 
certain persons who claim to be censors of the 
laws, and to be so far above them as to say when 
it will be best to execute them, and when to ig¬ 
nore them, can not be recognized. The Cin¬ 
cinnati Commercial has one convincing argu¬ 
ment which it throws off in a paragraph when¬ 
ever the subject of reform is agitated: “ When 
7 


9 8 


LECTURES. 


these reform gentlemen have agreed as to the 
extent to which the reform ought to go, let us 
hear from them.” The idea that men shall do 
nothing, until they are safe from error; that 
schools shall teach nothing, until they agree in 
the ultimates and penultimates of knowledge; 
that newspapers shall not agitate for reform, 
until they agree what reform is, is to crush im¬ 
provement in its cradle, and array the scattered 
variations of human opinion against the compact 
and organized forces of evil. The Conscience 
of society is enshrined in its laws. It demands 
as the very first condition of their organic union 
that they shall be executed. When the laws 
are bad, the Social Conscience will protest, as it 
always has protested against them, and over¬ 
throw them by the same power which imposed 
them. How far shall the reform go? Just so 
far as the laws demand. They become the sym¬ 
bol of unity; they are the standards by which 
one man’s excessive ideas must be lowered, and 
another’s laxity must be corrected. Every citi¬ 
zen has a right to agitate for the change of the 
law, but while it stands, it is the will of the peo¬ 
ple, and the poorest man in the city has a right 
to have it executed, even if the government has 
to organize its train bands to gratify him. If 


THE BETRAYAL OF A CITY. 


99 


the men who are pleased with the present con¬ 
dition of the city, who regard any restrictive 
laws as smacking of a paternal government, 
want to occupy a consistent position, let them 
organize for a repeal of the present license laws, 
and let them agree with the Commercial be¬ 
forehand, as to how far they want their reform 
to go. Of course, I do not propose that you 
shall take my assertion as to these laws and 
their want of execution. I propose to let you 
hear for yourselves what they are, and upon 
what officer they are mandatory, that you may 
see where the responsibility for this lawlessness 
rests. 

III. The chief municipal officer of this city 
is the Mayor, and the Mayor at the present time* 
is Mr. Robert M. Moore. The law which cre¬ 
ates him, instructs him. He is bound by the 
laws which he administers. The Mayoralty, 
though shorn of considerable power by the cre¬ 
ation of the Police Board, is an office of great 
trust and influence. The Mayor is really the 
custodian of the morality of the city. He is the 
sworn delegate of all the citizens, paid by them 
to devote his time to seeing that the city re¬ 
ceives no harm. When he was sworn in, he 
bound himself to well and truly execute the 


^'December, 1878. 



IOO 


LECTURES. 


laws of the city. What those laws are, ought 
to be his study. His first duty is to know his 
duty. The very first decree which he finds laid 
down for him, is the duty of issuing licenses for 
several different things. He is to license ferries, 
hackney coaches, hucksters, and all amusements 
of every kind for which money admittance is 
asked, or from which money is in any way de¬ 
rived. It is absolutely impossible for any man 
to give legally any kind of theatrical, or musi¬ 
cal, or other kind of entertainment, to a paying 
audience, without the written permission of 
Robert M. Moore. There is only one excep¬ 
tion, which never occurs. He is compelled to 
issue such license whether he chooses or not, if 
he is ordered to do so, by the City Council. But 
we need not consider such exceptional case. 
Every man who is to-night debauching the mor¬ 
als of the people by his vulgar shows, who is 
feeding the worst passions of the worst men, 
and stimulating those of better men, carries in 
his pocket the written permission of Robert M. 
Moore, the sworn guardian of the morals and 
peace of the city, and, among 300,000 inhabit¬ 
ants of the city, no other name would protect 
him. He holds a colossal power; he is the sole 
arbiter of the public amusements of this great 



THE BETRAYAL OF A CITY. 


IOI 


city. If Gulliver had gone from our cities to 
Laputa, he might have amused the King with 
this instance of absurdity of our public system. 
Does it not seem the height of absurdity that, 
in the choice of such an officer as the Mayor, 
we should be led by political considerations, 
and choose a man because he happens to be a 
Republican or Democrat? We might as well 
elect caucus candidates for bank directors, or a 
corrupt man for a trustee, because he was a Re¬ 
publican, rather than a pure man who was a 
Democrat. An office of such importance ought 
to be held by the most trusted man in the com¬ 
munity, and no man should care what his poli¬ 
tics are. But, as it is to-day, any man who can 
control the ward majorities in the primary elec¬ 
tions is nominated and elected on one ticket or 
the other. New York and Philadelphia have 
risen against this absurdity and elected pure and 
honest men, and the most that I look for from 
this recently appointed committee, is that they 
will make it possible to vote for a representa¬ 
tive man, a man who would be an influence in 
the Chamber of Commerce and in the moral 
interests of the city, when we shall have to 
elect the next Mayor. I have said that all in¬ 
decent shows must be given with the expressed 


102 


LECTURES. 


approval of the Mayor, The statute is explicit. 
“Any person who shall exhibit for pay any the¬ 
atrical or musical performance, of any kind 
whatever, without license from the Mayor, shall 
for each offense, on conviction before the 
Mayor, pay a fine of not less than $5, nor more 
than $100, with the costs of the prosecution. 
Of course when application is made for such a 
license, it is entirely subject to the Mayor’s dis¬ 
cretion. He may, or may not issue it, as shall 
seem best to him, even when the statute require¬ 
ments are fulfilled. The law gives him discre¬ 
tion. And I suppose that it can not be consid¬ 
ered a crime in the Mayor to lack discretion, 
even when the law gives it to him. From the 
foundation of the world, it was never heard that 
lack of common sense was indictable, although 
it may be worse than many a crime which is. 

If the trouble with us was simply, that the 
law gives the Mayor power to choose what men 
he should license, and he had not chosen the 
best men, it would merely be his opinion against 
ours, and while we might censure, we could not 
impeach him. But the case reaches far beyond 
mere weakness and indiscretion. 

(a) The Mayor ignores and disobeys the 
letter and spirit of the license laws every time 


THE BETRAYAL OF A CITY. 


IO 3 


he issues a license. The requirements of the 
law are not considered. And if they were con¬ 
sidered and executed there would be no neces¬ 
sity for this speech. Now look at the license 
system as the city ordinances create it, and as 
it is really administered. 

The idea of the law is not primarily to raise 
a revenue, but to regulate and control the city. 
The law-makers knew how powerful was the in¬ 
fluence of the amusements of the city upon the 
people, and they drew up a law which should 
insure the decency and morality of all such 
amusements. While they made the Mayor, as the 
most proper officer, the licenser, they by no means 
left it entirely to his wisdom as to whom these 
licenses were to issue. They required, and do to¬ 
day require, forms of application, which shall be 
guarantees to the Mayor, if he see fit to issue 
the license. Hear this strict statute: 

“ In the case of any license for theatrical per¬ 
formance, it shall only be granted to, and upon the 
application in 'writing , of the person or persons 
who shall have the actual control and direction 
of such performance, which application shall 
state the place or house in which it is proposed 
to conduct such performance, and the period for 
which license is asked, and shall be accompan- 


104 


LECTURES. 


ied by the recommendation, also in writing, of 
twelve or more respectable householders of the 
city, that such person is of good character, and fit 
and proper to have the control and direction of 
such performance. And when such perform¬ 
ance is to be had in any place, not before regu¬ 
larly used for such purpose, such application 
shall also be signed by twelve or more persons 
residing within four hundred feet of such house, 
that the same is a fit and proper place.” 

By referring to the Mayor’s record of licenses 
I find that on November 23, he issued three li¬ 
censes—Spoerl’s Opera House, on Central Ave¬ 
nue; Alberti’s theater, on Vine street, and 
Bender’s, on Central avenue. Under the above 
statute, how do you suppose those three variety 
theaters, the very worst in the city, ever satis¬ 
fied the Mayor that they were decent and proper 
places of amusement? Who were the twelve 
householders who recommended any one of 
them? Stimulated by just such a curiosity, I 
made it my business to go to the Mayor’s office, 
and find out. To my astonishment, I found that 
these licenses were issued to the applicants 
without a question asked; without any formal 
application; without a word in writing of either 
applicant or indorser; without a word as to 


THE BETRAYAL OF A CITY. 


I0 5 

the uses to which the hall licensed, was to be 
put. The only record is, that so many dollars 
were paid, and the license issued. The whole 
spirit and letter of the law, which was intended 
to put up barriers against just such entertain¬ 
ments, are recklessly ignored and violated. 
The Mayor has actually so far forgotten that he 
is under the law, that he has issued licenses to 
the lowest dens in the city, without the legal 
formalities, and against the clear injunction of 
the law, and has issued them without price, as 
charitable enterprises. 

On January 29, he issued a free license for six 
months, without any authority of law, and in 
direct violation of law in every particular, for a 
variety theater, in Cumminsville. The neigh¬ 
borhood, which by the law, ought to have been 
called on to recommend this place and person, 
was so annoyed, that they made formal com¬ 
plaint to the police authorities. Under their di¬ 
rection the place was invaded, and the proprie¬ 
tor produced his charity license, signed Robert 
M. Moore, Mayor. The same thing was done 
for Ryan. He paid $15 for permission to run 
the White House theater on Vine street, and 
out of the goodness of his heart and the plenti- 
tude of his power, the Mayor threw in a free 


io6 


LECTURES. 


license to run the same kind of a den on West 
Fifth street. Is it astonishing that the city is be¬ 
coming so immoral, that these vile sink-holes of 
iniquity, these licensed lazar houses grow and 
fester and spread, when the Mayor makes the 
law that was to crush them, the power to pro¬ 
tect them, and esteems them so highly that he 
coaxes them into life as public charities and ben¬ 
efactions. 

All the duties of the Mayor are specified on 
two pages of the city laws, and it is incredible 
that he should not know that he has no more 
authority to issue a license, except as the law 
prescribes, than any other citizen. Every license 
which he issues, bears upon its face the state¬ 
ment that it authorizes the bearer, “ he having 
conformed to the statute made,” and it is very 
questionable, it seems to me, whether such li¬ 
cense is not void, so long as the statute is never 
considered nor conformed to, by any applicant. 

(£) But the Mayor complains that he has 
no power, and where there is no power there 
can be no responsibility. He declares that the 
police authorities are responsible for any inde¬ 
cent or disorderly house, and that he can do 
nothing. But, while I think it to be very bad 
policy that separates the head from the arm of 


THE BETRAYAL OF A CITY. 


107 


the city government, and that the Mayor ought 
to be at least upon the Police Board, yet the 
plea is not good. The Mayor alone, can call 
these immoral amusements into being, and he 
alone can crush them. As he may refuse to 
license them, as he is compelled to refuse to li¬ 
cense them without respectable indorsement, so 
he and he alone may crush them out, by 
a stroke of his pen. The long line of villain¬ 
ous pits that yawn on Vine street, might be 
closed up to morrow, if Robert M. Moore 
were willing to revoke the licenses which he 
has illegally issued, and they could not by any 
possibility revive again, except by his consent. 
The moral sentiment of this city is in his hands, 
and is paralyzed by his touch. 

(c) Again, besides his violation of the law 
in licensing these places, and his failure to fill 
the law in revoking them, he is guilty of a third 
violation in not sending his licenses to the City 
Council for their consent or rejection. 

The law requires that “ the Mayor shall keep 
a record of all licenses issued, and shall make 
a monthly return of the same to the Council, 
and, if approved by them, the licenses shall be 
of full force and effect, but if not approved by 
them, the money shall be refunded and the 
license annulled.” (Chap. 22, sec. 9.) 


io8 


LECTURES. 


No such proceeding ever occurs. The Coun¬ 
cil, which by the law is made part of a city 
excise authority, and is vested with a veto upon 
every license of the Mayor, has been quietly 
ignored and set aside. As I was told in the 
Mayor’s office, the Mayor thinks his power too 
much curtailed as it is, without setting the 
Council over him. But there is the law, just 
as specific as it can be, and mandatory upon 
the Mayor. The fact of the case is just this, 
the Mayor does just as he pleases. The law 
may not agree with him, but so much the worse 
for the law. The city may rub its eyes and 
wonder how it has so radically and rapidly lost 
its character; but the Mayor knows that what 
is everybody’s business is nobody’s, and he may 
continue to throw favors in the way of that 
large and powerful body of citizens who, at the 
elections, make up in personal activity what 
they lack in personal worth. The road to 
higher office may lie over the ruins of broken 
pledges, and through the dens of a demoralized 
city. I do not say anything derogatory to the 
present Mayor, when I say that he is ambitious. 
The man who uses one office as a stepping 
stone to another, is not apt to be particular 
whether he overthrows the stone as he leaves 


THE BETRAYAL OF A CITY. 


IO9 

it. From the day in 1870 when this same gen¬ 
tlemen, not then Mayor, made his speech to the 
Germans and his bid for the office, down to the 
time of his speech to the rioters on the White- 
water Valley road, and through his entire ad¬ 
ministration, he has been influenced by some 
occult power into a courting of the worst ele¬ 
ments in the city. Not that I include the Ger¬ 
mans in that term, for I have the highest regard 
for them and their orderly and thrifty ways, but 
I refer to that speech for the wonderful senti¬ 
ments which it contained, and for the exposition 
which it furnishes of the inner spirit of its 
speaker. Nor do I wish to be thought harsh 
or disrespectful to Mr. Moore himself. I do 
not personally know him, but do not doubt that 
he is a genial and pleasant gentleman. All that 
is entirely consistent with my belief that he is a 
bad, inefficient, and negligent magistrate. It is 
in his public capacity that I criticise him, and 
there he is very vulnerable—has no defense. 
He no doubt found a loose administration of the 
municipal law when he was inaugurated, and 
was weak enough to go with the current, which 
swept him into complete disregard of it. The 
desire of propitiating all elements in the city 
has sacrificed the rights of all, and when he re- 


110 


LECTURES. 


tires from office, he may reverse the proud 
declaration of Augustus, and remember that he 
found a city clothed with the splendors of 
morality, and left it bedizened with the orna¬ 
ments of prostitution. Now, this city is too 
great and too important to be sacrificed either 
to the ambition or weakness of any one man, 
and this whole question comes back again to 
the beginning. What are we going to do about 
it? The whole thing hangs together—Sunday 
question, gambling, variety shows, and cheap 
concerts, which become assignation houses. 
And the weight of the whole chain is upon the 
shoulders of Mayor Moore. 

IV. Look at the Sunday question, which is 
entirely aside from what I have been discussing 
and look at it still from the standpoint of a citi¬ 
zen. In the old licenses, the former Mayors, 
always exercised the authority given them in 
direct terms, and specified upon the license that 
it was not good upon Sunday. 

That authority still exists. If Mayor Moore 
wanted to, he could shut up the places which 
are notoriously and confessedly bad on every 
day, but especially upon that day when work¬ 
ing men have most money, most leisure and 
most temptation. 


THE BETRAYAL OF A CITY. 


Ill 


While the general statute forbidding com¬ 
mon labor upon Sunday is in force, he might 
well make, as his predecessors did, such an ex¬ 
ception upon the authority granted. In some 
parts of Canada, the liquor laws, which license 
an unrestricted sale throughout the week, com¬ 
pel every saloon to close its doors on Saturday 
evening at 6 o’clock, and remain closed until 
6 o’clock Monday morning. But this arrange¬ 
ment made in the interests of workingmen, and 
by the votes of workingmen, would seem to be 
too paternal for our climate, where the rights of 
the individual triumph over the rights of society, 
and any effort of sumptuary laws or restrictions 
is met by that quotation from St. Paul: “ To 
his own master he standeth or falleth,” let him 
alone. But to my apprehension, society in its 
aggregate is every man’s master here, and so¬ 
cial order has a divine right to prescribe what 
every man may do or may not do. If then, the in¬ 
terest of society at large require that all kinds of 
immoral and expensive amusements shall be 
closed on the day when the lower classes, I mean 
the less educated classes, would be most likely 
to plunge into dissipation and crime, the inclina¬ 
tion of one class must give way to the wis¬ 
dom and demand of others. I am not forgetful 


11 2 


LECTURES. 


of all that is said, and truly said, about the few 
pleasures of the poor, and the slight opportuni¬ 
ties to get any sunshine from life except on 
Sunday. No man can sympathize with that, 
or with them, more than I. It is a blessed thing 
on Sunday to see the street leading into the 
green country full of them. The day when 
Cardinal Granville originated the saying, “That 
mischievous animal, the people,” has been bur¬ 
ied by three hundred times three hundred 
days. 

All that is asked is that these same happy 
working-men shall not be regarded as the de- 
manders of this kind of Sunday, into which we 
are drifting, and which will in time sweep away 
the civil enactments that free them from labor 
on that day. You can not separate the general 
amusement of one class from the general labor 
of another to furnish it, and in the end it will be 
as it always has been, the rich enjoying Sunday, 
and the workmen furnishing the means for pay. 
It will come just as surely as it has already be¬ 
gun. 

In every Sunday theater, an army of laborers 
work for another army’s gratification. The boy 
who carries the beer on Sunday, is certainly one 
of the laboring class. Where does he derive 


THE BETRAYAL OF A CITY. 


Ir 3 

the benefit of the general rest? And as he 
gives up his Sundays, to his employers’ demand, 
as the baker bakes for his customers’ demand, 
as the brewer brews, so the end of the system 
is in sight, and we may foresee the day when 
men, at the call of their employers, must take 
the pick and the shovel, and needle, and go 
to the lathe, and furnace, and shops, to create 
an additional day’s supply for an additional day’s 
demand, and the Sunday of the civil enactment 
as well as of the divine ordinance, will be a thing 
of the past. Those who are so eagerly clamor¬ 
ing for a Sunday of general amusement for the 
working classes had better study carefully 
whether that be not the way to deprive them of 
what little they now enjoy. Better for them 
that they should have personal liberty, to make 
their Sunday happy with their family, as they 
will, or in the many pleasures which nature and 
society afford, than that the wheels of business 
should be set in motion to amuse them, and in 
turn start the wheels to which their life is tied, 
and which are necessary to the happiness of 
others. It is a pity that the Mayor, who has 
followed the bad precedents of former Mayors, 
has ignored their better one, and struck out the 
clause which excepts Sunday from the ordinary 


LECTURES. 


114 

licenses. But I am aware that in this matter I 
can only charge him with indifference to the 
moral sentiment of the community, and not 
with any violation of law. It is a pleasure to 
mention those points where he is shielded by 
the law, for one can not find many of them. 

Now, under such a statement of the law as it 
is, and of the practice as it is, it seems to me 
there ought to be some way to bring about a 
change in the condition of the city. I am not 
a lawyer, and do not propose to offer any legal 
propositions, but if there is nothing possible in 
this case but moral suasio?i , which the newly 
appointed committee propose to use, then we 
may as well enact a repeal of all our laws and 
elect some man to be a law for us. It can not 
be possible that in the arsenal of the law there 
is not some enginery to compel the specific per¬ 
formance of specific laws. And if there is any 
way to compel the Mayor to truly execute the 
license laws, which he violates, we should of 
necessity have a reform in a short space of time 
which would sweep away the numerous dens 
where young and old, boys and girls, good and 
bad, are getting the education which carries 
them to the gutter, to the dirk, the Police Court 
the Criminal Court, the penitentiary, the gallows. 


THE BETRAYAL OF A CITY. H5 

Speculate as you will upon what shall be, or 
what might be, but never forget that the respon¬ 
sibility for this present state of municipal cor¬ 
ruption, rests primarily and crushingly upon the 
weakness, ignorance and faithlessness of one 
man, who might have prevented it, and might 
now, by his own will, correct it; and that man 
is Robert M. Moore, Mayor of the City of Cin¬ 
cinnati. 


The Curse of Tenement Houses. 


So long as it seems to be determined by the 
masterly inactivity of the moral sentiment of 
Cincinnati, that godliness shall be driven out as 
an unprofitable visitor, I raise my voice to-night 
in behalf of that virtue which has been proverb¬ 
ially called her sister—cleanliness. If we can’t 
be Christians, let us at least be clean heathens. 
If we must imitate Paris, in the headlong plunge 
into dissipation and vice, let us be thoughtful 
enough to penetrate into the secret of her sani¬ 
tation, and hunt for a Haussman to clean and 
purify us. On this issue, I imagine, all opinions 
unite. It appeals to the health, safety, and 
interest of every citizen, and its importance can 
not be over-estimated. When the yellow fever 
was slowly creeping along the river this sum¬ 
mer, there was a wide-spread and well-grounded 
fear that Cincinnati might be stricken with the 
pestilence. Its condition invited it. All the 
circumstances that combined to make Memphis 



THE CURSE OF TENEMENT HOUSES. ny 

and New Orleans susceptible to the poisonous 
germs of disease, were known to exist here. 
The sanitary condition was abominable, and to¬ 
day it is as bad as it can be, and we may be 
sure of one thing, that the death-rate from con¬ 
tagious diseases will not diminish until some re¬ 
form has been brought about. There are many 
distinct points in this question which will need 
discussion. But, to-night, I have selected one 
which I have taken pains to inform myself 
upon, and that is, the curse and the crime of the 
tenement house system, as it exists in Cincin¬ 
nati. 

We are the most remarkable people in the 
world for taking pains to find out, after epidemics 
or disasters, how they might have been averted 
and we are the slowest in guarding against 
those which are plainly impending. Under the 
spur of an awakened philanthropy, we sent 
$70,000, and much more than that, to the strick¬ 
en cities in the South, but you can’t imagine the 
difficulty with which an appropriation of $1,000 
is passed, needed for prevention at home. We 
have spent $18,000,000 for a city railroad prop¬ 
erty, and paid last year $2,135,000 interest, and 
yet for the lack of a little money and wisdom, 
we let the city remain in such a condition, that it 


n8 


LECTURES. 


may at any time be given over to an epidemic 
that will lose millions of dollars to the trade of 
the city. Any one of the Southern cities 
might well have taxed itself heavily before the 
summer, to prevent a fever which carried off so 
many citizens, and shut off all commercial re¬ 
lations with the world for six months. Any 
assessment, less than one-half the entire busi¬ 
ness of the city would have been economy. 
But I needn’t go South for an example. We 
have passed through many epidemics in the last 
ten years, here in our own city. In that time, 
we have had three small pox epidemics, which 
killed thousands, and diverted much trade from 
the city. In 1868 and 1869, there were 871 vic¬ 
tims to this disease. In 1871, it visited us again, 
and in this year and the next carried off 1,545 
of our people. In 1874, after only two years 
absence, it again prevailed with greater viru¬ 
lence in every part of the city, created a 
panic in the business and social community, 
and died out after it had murdered 1,600 
more victims. Alternating with the years of 
this dreadful scourge, were epidemics of fevers 
and cholera. In 1873, between the two fright¬ 
ful smallpox years, scarlet fever claimed 410 
victims, and in 1874, 687. In that same fatal 


THE CURSE OF TENEMENT HOUSES. ng 

year, 1873, there were more than 500 deaths 
from cholera. This is a terrible showing for a 
city like Cincinnati, which has all the natural 
advantages for health. What is the reason that 
St. Louis, which lies on a plain, and near the 
alluvium of mighty rivers, has a death-rate of 
only eleven, to the 1,000 inhabitants, and Cin¬ 
cinnati one of fifteen? And why is it that in 
1876, the disproportion was greater even, the 
two rates being fourteen and a half to twenty- 
one and a half to the 1,000? When we come 
to answer that question, we shall find among 
other causes, the tenement house system in the 
more contracted city stands at the head. There 
is no more important matter which ought to oc¬ 
cupy our time and attention than this, just at 
this season. Experience and fact foretell a re¬ 
petition of the past so long as its causes are un¬ 
changed. We may certainly apprehend a pes¬ 
tilence in the coming year if we do not exert 
ourselves to remove its germs and material. 
Nay, we are now in the midst of an epidemic 
which has been slowly but surely developing 
for months. 

From the unpublished report of the Health 
Officer for the year just closed, I find that scar¬ 
let fever has become general. From twenty- 


120 


LECTURES. 


four deaths in June, the increase has been 
marked. In July, twenty-seven; in August it 
fell to twenty-four again; in September, it was 
forty-seven; in October,fifty-seven; in Novem¬ 
ber, seventy-seven; and in December, about ioo. 
Total for the year, 422 deaths. How many 
cases there were can not be known. In the light 
of this statement read the news from New 
York: 

“ Scarlet fever has, to the consternation of the 
sanitary authorities, assumed an epidemic form 
in New York. During the month ending to¬ 
day, 718 cases were reported at head-quarters, 
each case necessitating a thorough disinfection 
of the places where the sufferers lay.” 

I believe that there could be no higher econ¬ 
omic wisdom on the part of the city, than to 
take this matter of its health into serious con¬ 
sideration, and spend enough money to put it¬ 
self in a clean and wholesome sanitary condi¬ 
tion. I am aware there is a general lack of 
knowledge in the public mind of the relation 
between cleanliness and health, and there might 
be a well-grounded doubt of the necessity of 
more money, when we hear that the City 
Buildings consumed $8,000 worth of soap, and 
other sanitary articles in the year past. But 


THE CURSE OF TENEMENT HOUSES. 


121 


while it is gratifying to know that there is such 
a ravenous demand for those articles there, we 
must remember that the expenditure is needed 
elsewhere—in proper sewerage and drainage; 
in street cleaning; in garbage regulations; and 
above all, in the oversight and care of that vast 
and potential element of our population which 
lives in tenement houses. 

NUMBER, SIZE, INHABITANTS. 

When the health report of 1871 was made, 
there were somewhat over 1,400 tenement houses 
in the city, and the Health Officer tells me that 
there are at least 1,500 now. They are scat¬ 
tered all over the city, being thickest in the 
river wards and in the most poverty-stricken por¬ 
tions of the city. They are of all sizes,* from 
the great building of ninety or one hundred 
rooms, down to those of two or three rooms. 
The tenement houses in the German quarter 
of the city are large and crowded, but clean 
and neat. So far as I am able to find out, they 
give cheap and healthy accommodation to those 
who seek it, and there is only one objection that 
can be raised against them, which is, that the in¬ 
veterate opposition of the Germans to vaccina¬ 
tion has made these otherwise safe and whole- 


122 


LECTURES 


some houses, terrible charnel houses, whenever 
the smallpox has been epidemic. The reports 
show that, owing to the mistaken fear of the 
only preventive that is known, the Germans 
have always contributed the largest number of 
victims. But as this applies to them generally, 
and not to the tenement houses alone, it does 
not affect what I have said, that they have the 
tenement house system in about as good a con¬ 
dition as it exists among the poor anywhere. 
It is to those below the canal that the city must 
look, and if the public mind could be aroused 
to the state of affairs there, they would not be 
tolerated in their present condition for a week. 
I must not be understood to say that there are 
none but bad ones below the canal. There are 
some which are in excellent condition, and those 
in the very worst parts of the city. But the 
story of the others is fearful, is incredible to 
those who have no personal knowledge of them. 
I venture to say, not as a rhetorical figure, that 
Stanley might return from Africa, and see 
things in this city, as barbarous and filthy and 
sickening as anything he saw at the fountains 
of the Nile. Within a stone’s throw of the 
most aristocratic portions of this city, where lit¬ 
erature adorns wealth, and religion lifts its 


THE CURSE OF TENEMENT HOUSES. 


I23 


splendid spires, and concentrates its richest 
blessings, there is another civilization, or rather 
absence of it, where thousands of human be¬ 
ings are crowded like cattle in the pens, and 
lose all the sympathies of humanity in a greedy 
struggle for their common pittance of air, and 
light and water. Here are the plague spots, 
here you may look with utmost certainty for 
the silent forces of disease which shall pene¬ 
trate your house and strike down your child. 
Oh that society might learn that lesson; that 
neglected poverty has. its instant revenge on 
neglectful wealth. The great pendulum of 
compensation swings from side to side. Com¬ 
petence sits by the fireside and reads of the tre¬ 
mendous suffering and disease among the poor, 
and gives a sigh that it is so, but regards it from 
every point but one of close personal interest. 
The suffering and disease, neglected, ripen and 
spread, and force their way through his doors 
and windows, and remind him by the hoarse 
sounds of death, that human society is a body, 
and that mortification of the smallest part, neg¬ 
lected, means death to the whole body. We 
may corral these Joes down in the Tom-all- 
alones, of our cities, but they leave their mark 
on the faces and the health of those we love 


124 


LECTURES. 


We may grind them down and ride over them, 
but they have the gigantic power of Sampson, 
and kill most, when they die. 

I wish I could describe so vividly that the 
impression should outlast the thing itself, the 
misery and filth in some of these haunts. Of 
course, there are many things about them which, 
because they are so bad, can not be described, 
and must be left to the imagination as the worst 
part of the whole. 

BIG MISSOURI. 

On the west side of Sycamore street between 
Seventh and Eighth, stands a five-story brick 
building, which has been christened the Big 
Missouri. The origin of the name has not 
been made known to me, but I can find an 
excellent one in the fact that that river is loaded 
down with more mud and filth than any other in 
America. This building was originally a spice 
mill, and on the withdrawal of that enterprise, 
it was converted into a tenement house. It has 
ninety-five rooms, and has contained as many 
as 300 tenants at one time. The entrance to 
it is by a small, filthy alley leading into a court, 
on which open rooms on either side. Standing 
here in this court, in filth which is intolerable, 


THE CURSE OF TENEMENT HOUSES. 125 

even in winter, we can look up and see the 
rooms of the live stories which front into the 
court. Rotten wooden staircases, without sup¬ 
port, except the mortise in the walls, rise like 
frail scaffoldings, and are thronged by people on 
their narrow descents. Into this court is thrown 
all the refuse of all the rooms. There is but 
little decaying vegetation, because there are 
hungry mouths to act as scavengers even if 
there were any to decay. In this court is the 
one hydrant from which all must supply them¬ 
selves, and when I visited the place the hydrant 
was frozen, and there was not a drop of water 
obtainable on the premises, the tenants having 
to carry it from Seventh street. But the rooms 
and the people are alike fearful to contemplate. 
The rooms facing the court have, of course, the 
light that comes in when the door is open, and 
some have one window, which is full of rags 
and papers, there being no glass remaining. 
The rooms are small, dark, unventilated, and 
rent for different prices, from $2.00 to $4.00 per 
month. But the rooms that stand away from 
the porches in the elbows are absolutely dark. 
There the tenants sit in darkness, or by the 
small light of a small stove, or in the close air 
of a burning lamp. Except in the front, there 


126 


LECTURES. 


is not a ray of sunlight ever penetrates into this 
swamp, and the walls exude water, and the 
black and dingy wood is in perpetual soak from 
year to year. Many had no article of furniture. 
In one room, two old women had made a fire, 
and every article in the room was a sack of 
rags in the corner, which was their bed at night; 
an old soap box, sawed in two, made two seats, 
from which they craned toward the fire. In 
another room lay a sick woman, dying from 
pneumonia, and all she owned was a filthy sheet, 
torn and ragged, which covered her. In another 
room, the very kind and tender-hearted inspec¬ 
tor, who impressed me much with the delicacy 
and thoughtfulness with which he treated the 
people, pointed out to me an old woman. “ She 
was dying last week in the cold snap,” he said, 
“ when I came into her room, she had no 
strength to strike a match, and was actually 
frozen and dying.” But why multiply such sto¬ 
ries, when one is just like the other. In half an 
hour, I saw and heard of every kind of suffer¬ 
ing to which mankind is subjected, and moved 
among gaunt and spectral figures, carrying 
gaunt and spectral babies, until it seemed as if 
the fair world without were heaven itself. Now, 
you ask, why there is not something done to 


THE CURSE OF TENEMENT HOUSES. 


127 


abate such a nuisance. The general statutes of 
the State give the Health Board powers to act 
in such cases, but it is claimed that there is no 
appropriation to cover the cost of prosecuting. 
The law provides that, in case of a nuisance of 
this kind, the board may notify the owner or 
agent to correct it, and in case of his failure so 
to do, the board may proceed itself to make 
such changes and sanitary provisions as are nec¬ 
essary, and may cause the cost to be charged 
upon the tax duplicate against such property. 
The Health Officer, however, declared that the 
statute is impracticable in view of the appropri¬ 
ations made for his office. He would be com¬ 
pelled to advance such money for the work done, 
and also the cost of prosecuting the case before 
the Courts. 

The Police Commissioners have struggled 
with the problem of this very tenement house 
of which I have been speaking. A year ago 
they sent a formal letter to the owner, advising 
him of the necessity of a change. Such action 
was made necessary by the letter from the then 
Health Officer, Dr. Kearney, from which I 
quote : “ Gentlemen, I beg to direct your at¬ 

tention to the building, 247 Sycamore street, the 
condition of which is horrible in the extreme. 


128 


LECTURES. 


The building mentioned is used as a tenement 
house chiefty, and, as I am informed, contains 
ninety-five rooms, which are partly occupied by 
forty families, numbering about one hundred 
and thirty-five persons. These wretched people 
live in a condition of the utmost squalor, there 
being absolutely no provision for cleanliness, for 
the building has been without any water supply 
for many months.” Then follows in detail the 
description of filthiness which can not be re¬ 
peated here, and yet it does not begin to tell the 
story as it really is. “Many holes,” he continues, 
“ exist in the floors that are dangerous to limb, 
and in case of fire, the liability to the loss of 
life would be very great, for escape by the 
wooden porches and stairways would be apt to 
be cut off in a very short time. I will only add 
that the building is liable to become a hot-bed 
of disease whenever conditions favorable to the 
development of disease exist, and is now an out¬ 
rage against decency and humanity.” 

According to the advice contained in this let¬ 
ter, the Police Board formally notified the owner 
to make the necessary repairs within ten days,, 
and, although that letter was sent on January 
17th, the building is as bad as ever. I am glad 
to say that the Grand Jury visited the building 


THE CURSE OF TENEMENT HOUSES. 


I29 


recently, and, after inspecting it so far as they 
could endure the misery, they brought in a true 
bill against the owner, and he has his trial be¬ 
fore him. But, in the meantime, the danger, 
and wretchedness, and lingering death go on be¬ 
hind that red wall that looks out upon a broad 
and handsome street. 

Go from here down to Sixth and Culvert 
streets, and you may see another sight. Here 
stands a building, where want of area space has 
been supplied by burrowing under ground. 
There I found ten rooms sunk fifteen feet under 
ground, and some of them thirty feet, they be¬ 
ing a cellar and sub-cellar — small, with no 
light, no air, wet, dreary dungeons, compared 
with which no jail could be worse. There one 
sees white wife and black husband, and 
black wife and white husband, sorting the 
refuse they have gathered from the city dumps, 
by the flickering light of a dirty lamp, while the 
city above them is bathed in the free, pure sun¬ 
light. There, in one room, just eight by six 
feet, without a window, lived husband and wife 
and one boarder. Across from them, in another 
closet of the same size, another family lived in 
darkness, and on the box used for a table, I saw 
bones reserved for dinner, that the dogs had 


! 3 o 


LECTURES. 


turned away from in the garbage heaps of the 
public streets. I am telling you facts, not sur¬ 
mising. I know this to be true; in the Christmas 
week of 1878, in the city of Cincinnati. For 
these dreary rat holes, these people pay $2.00, 
$2.50, and $3.50 per month. I could give you 
many instances of these tenement houses if the 
general effect of their condition would be en¬ 
hanced by doing so. But from a bundle of re¬ 
cent and unpublished reports of inspectors to 
the Health Office, I will group the rest together. 

The building northwest corner of Court and 
Main, forty-six rooms, occupied by eighteen 
families, with thirty-five children and thirty- 
nine adults. Total in forty-six rooms, seventy- 
four. In fair sanitary condition. 

Building No. 89 Central avenue, three-story 
and basement. Number of rooms, twenty-two, 
occupied by eleven families and fifty-seven per¬ 
sons. Yard sloppy and unpaved. Porches rot¬ 
ten and dangerous. Sanitary condition very bad. 

Third and Central avenue, twenty-seven rooms 
and forty-seven persons. Wall on Third street 
side considered unsafe. 126 Central avenue, 
twenty-five rooms and seventy-one people. 

The reports go on in this manner, showing 
some in fair condition, some in good, and many 
in bad condition. 


THE CURSE OF TENEMENT HOUSES. 131 

I have now put before you the facts as to 
these tenement houses, and it will not require 
much effort to show you that they are plague 
spots; that they affect the city in three different 
ways, and, aside from the humanitarian aspect 
which must present itself to every citizen, they 
appeal directly to us, as they are powerful 
factors in the health, the morality, the wealth of 
the entire city. 

They develop and spread disease. 

It would seem to be a prima facie presump¬ 
tion, that the miasmatic diseases should find 
their origin and material in localities where 
miasma is the greatest. When the circumstan¬ 
ces are such that the inhabitants of a room in¬ 
hale more cubic feet of air than the room con¬ 
tains, it is clear that they are soon inhaling an 
air poisoned with the gases of their own blood 
purification. Without light, without enough 
food or proper food, without any bathing facili¬ 
ties, and almost without water, without proper 
care of the sick and dead, it can not be a rational 
presumption that these people are not especially 
liable to sickness, and to zymotic diseases es¬ 
pecially. Now, in the 1,500 tenement houses 
in Cincinnati, there are probably 30,000 people, 
and if there be not so many, we shall find some 


i3 2 


LECTURES. 


startling facts as to mortality among them. 
There is, then, one person in a tenement house 
to every ten in private residences. Now, if the 
rate of mortality were the same between the 
two modes of life, it is clear that of the total 
mortality, only one in ten should be front tene¬ 
ment houses. But the report of Dr. Kearney of 
last year shows that of a total of 4,400 deaths in 
the city, 2,700 died in tenements, and only 1,200 
in private houses, so that, instead of one-tenth 
of the mortality, we see that these 30,000 per¬ 
sons contribute more than twice as many vic¬ 
tims as the remaining 270,000 of the population. 

In 1874, the total mortality was 5,300, and the 
tenement houses furnished 3,200 of them, while 
private residences lost only 1,200, or but little 
more than one-third as many. In 1875, the pro¬ 
portion varies but little — 3,100 to 1,300. This 
was the year when the smallpox made its third 
visitation since the organization of the Health 
Board; and Dr. Quinn, in his report, says: “Two 
thousand five hundred and eighty-two cases 
were reported during the year. From August, 
1873, until January, 1875, no cases oc¬ 

curred in the city. During the /all and winter 
of 1874, smallpox was prevailing in an adjoin¬ 
ing city, with which our own had daily, con- 


THE CURSE OF TENEMENT HOUSES. 


*33 


stant communication. About the beginning of 
1875, it made its appearance in Cincinnati. The 
first two cases occurred among tramps seeking 
shelter during the winter in the city. The two 
places where they were, were immediately 
closed, cleansed, disinfected, and fumigated. 
The disease, however, started northward from 
these two points, being dislodged by measures 
enforced by the sanitary police, until it reached 
the territory north and east of the canal. Here 
it found victims and shelter in the many over¬ 
crowded tenement houses with which the dis¬ 
trict abounds. At a later period, cases traceable 
to communication with this district, appeared in 
the lower part of the city.” 

In 1873, the cholera was epidemic here, and 
of this plague Dr. Quinn says: “ In the portion 
of the city where the mortality was greatest, the 
tenement houses were numerous and population 
dense.” Of the deaths from the cholera, 34 
were in private houses, and 142 in tenements. 
These tenement houses in which deaths occurred 
were 131, containing 734 families, and 2,900 
persons.” 

These tenement houses thus become centers 
of disease. Their inhabitants make their influ¬ 
ence felt in every part of the city. In San Fran- 


J 34 


LECTURES. 


cisco, I have seen one tenement house where 
there were 1,500 Chinese living in squalor and 
dirt, but they were, to a certain extent, isolated 
from the general community. They were not 
scattered daily in close contact with all elements 
of the city population. But here, the children 
come from these sinks and mix with the thou¬ 
sands in the public schools, here, men and 
women issue from these lazar houses and are 
found in saloons and stores and churches, and 
at the doors of the rich. We do not know any¬ 
thing about the diseased patient dying four miles 
away from us to-night, but the noxious influence 
may be carried “ on the sightless couriers of 
the air,” and make itself active in our home and 
life. 

On the ground of municipal and private dis¬ 
ease, then, I hold up these tenement houses to 
public condemnation. 

Our city has an unenviable number and con¬ 
dition of them, owing to the contracted area 
of the city between the river and the hills. Dr. 
Clendenin says, in his report for 1870: “ There 
is no city in the United States in which a larger 
proportional population is crowded into tene¬ 
ment houses—badly arranged, illy lighted and 
ventilated—than Cincinnati. There are many of 


THE CURSE OF TENEMENT HOUSES. 


*35 


them without one square yard of air space, ex¬ 
cepting that used as an entrance.” 

VICE AND CRIME. 

There are no statistics by which we can say 
exactly how large a proportion of criminals 
come from tenement houses, but it must be very 
large. Those quarters of the city which have 
the most unenviable reputation at the police 
office are the ones where these overcrowded 
tenements are found. The plane on which 
those people live is so low, and so devoid of all 
comfort and respect, that the calls to crime be¬ 
come urgent. Every temptation becomes 
fiercer, every passion is inflamed, the demand 
of the moment must be gratified, and it is no 
nice question of casuistry or social order which 
governs them. What claim has society upon 
them? they reason. They lose all the checks 
upon vice which are found in a well-ordered so¬ 
ciety. Reputation, wife, children, religion, what 
are they to twenty families living promiscuously 
among themselves, and daily familiarized with 
every possible wickedness and vice ? When men 
starve in gloomy cellars, they must be rarely 
virtuous if they shrink from a penal act which 
will give them clean food and air in the public 


136 


LECTURES. 


institutions. As a municipal economy we would 
better make our jails and penitentiaries less 
comfortable, or our poor quarters more so. 
From these houses go out the thieves and burg¬ 
lars, thugs and brawlers, the terror of quietness 
and peace. By its own necessities, this great 
element is made a standing menace to a society 
which ignores and despises them. They are the 
Faubourgs of to-day. On the ground of muni- - 
cipal and personal fear of lawlessness, vice, and 
crime, I hold up this tenement house system as 
it is in some cases, to public knowledge and con¬ 
demnation. The vast expense of reformatory 
schools and public institutions, penal and chari¬ 
table, would shrink rapidly if more were spent 
at the other end of the scale. Let us try the 
experiment of anticipating the crimes which we 
are so heavily taxed to punish. 

EFFECTS ON BUSINESS AND PROPERTY. 

Again, this large element stands as an un¬ 
known quantity in all the calculations which 
money makes in seeking an investment. Of 
course, all values of real estate are depressed 
in the neighborhood of great tenement houses, 
but I do not refer to that fact so much as to the 
disturbance of trade, by the breaking out of epi- 


THE CURSE OF TENEMENT HOUSES. 


137 


demies in this class of people. As there is no 
sanitary care of them, as there is practically no 
oversight of them, no man who goes into busi¬ 
ness can say whether his trade will not be shut 
off for months by quarantine or by general panic. 

The volume of business done in Cincinnati in 
the last ten years has been largely affected by 
the general health. As we trade largely with 
other cities, the mere rumor of epidemic disease 
here has been enough to divert trade to other 
cities. Even money interests give way to per¬ 
sonal safety, and men will pay more for produce 
or merchandise in a healthy town, than in an in¬ 
fected one. The small-pox epidemic of 1874 
undoubtedly decreased the business of 1874, 
and every calculation which we may make, as 
to the prospects for 1879, must be based upon 
the supposition that there will be no unusual 
sickness. Should there be an epidemic, it will, 
just in proportion to its spread and malignancy, 
paralyze commerce, and country orders will go 
elsewhere. Stock on hand will accumulate and 
depreciate, and there will be a general acknowl¬ 
edgment of that truth which no one acts upon 
beforehand, that half the money lost by the pesti¬ 
lence might have prevented it and its attending 
sorrow and grief. Some of the Southern cities 


LECTURES. 


I3 8 

have lost branches of their trade forever, and 
it will take years for any of them to recover 
what they have lost. The nation has sent a 
Fever Commission to the South to find out the 
causes of the pestilence, but it would have saved 
the nation millions of dollars if it had sought 
that knowledge earlier, and there is no kind of 
municipal wisdom which would so exalt Cincin¬ 
nati, as a thorough sanitation of the city, and the 
expenditure of enough money to remove all the 
known causes of epidemic diseases. 

What the manner of proceedings should be, 
may to some extent be doubtful, but there are 
several plain suggestions which are beyond 
cavil. Of proper sewerage, and drainage, and 
street-cleaning, I do not speak now, because I 
propose to inform myself upon these matters 
carefully before I discuss them in their turn. 
But some different management of tenement 
houses is imperatively demanded. The city 
should require the owners of such property to 
keep them in good condition. 

It is not a hardship that the government says 
to a steamship company that proposes to carry 
large numbers of passengers, “ You shall limit 
your passenger list to your accommodation, and 
you shall not turn your wheels until you make 


THE CURSE OF TENEMENT HOUSES. 


J 39 


proper provision for the safety and health of 
your living freight” What a universal cry 
went up a few years ago, when the facts as 
to the steerage accommodations of some of 
the lines were made public. But what is an 
overcrowded steerage, with all its misery, for 
two or three weeks, compared with an over¬ 
crowded tenement house in more infamous con¬ 
dition from year to year, than any ship that rots? 
The law which applies to all common carriers 
of human life ought to apply to these anchored 
vessels, these moored ships. The danger is 
great enough, the element exposed is large 
enough, the suffering is marked enough to call 
for a Board of Tenement Inspection, with means 
and power to compel a reform in the system. 
Not a single house should be allowed to take 
tenants until it had made provision for light, 
ventilation, water, and sanitary convenience. 
But you say it wouldn’t pay the proprietors. It 
doesn’t pay them now. With all the misery of 
these worse houses, the income barely pays the 
taxes. Better houses could get better rents, and 
the system would rise together onto a higher 
plane. But it is not a question for the public 
whether such a legal requirement would compel 
a loss of money to the owners or not. There is 


140 


LECTURES. 


a far higher question — that of the safety of the 
community and the protection of the poor. 

It is infamous that a people who cry out so 
loud against inhumanity should nightly go to 
sleep under the same gaslights with such an in¬ 
human system as this. If it cost the city a vast 
amount to reform it, it would be a matter of 
economy, of decency, of humanity, of civil pride, 
to do it. It would be the greatest exposition ever 
city gave. But it would cost very little more 
than the official salaries and the amount neces¬ 
sary to prosecute under the present laws. This 
last year we spent only $16,000 for all sanitary 
purposes. For the same purpose in 1873, we 
spent $39,000, in 1875, $40,000, and in 1874, 
$51,000. Why have we struck off so much 
from the one fund which needed it? We still 
spend $13,000 a year for printing and useless 
advertising. Look over the daily papers and see 
column after column, day after day, filled with 
city and county advertisements, swelled and 
padded with legal phraseology, which ninety in 
a hundred don’t read, and couldn’t understand 
if they did. All this we have to pay for at prices 
far beyond what it could be done for, when the 
Health Office is crippled in doing a work that 
is absolutely necessary. Our Parks cost us just 


THE CURSE OF TENEMENT HOUSES. 


141 

about as much this year as the entire Health 
Department. Our gas costs us thirteen times as 
much. We need no more taxes, but a proper 
application of the money already raised. 

I am done. Agitation lies behind all reforms. 
I do not anticipate any immediate results from 
an effort like this. I remember Moore’s well- 
turned remark: “ The minds of our statesmen, 
like the pupil of the human eye, contract when 
light is poured into them.” But I have confidence 
that facts like these brought constantly before 
an intelligent and sympathetic people will grow 
more and more luminous, and compel attention 
and action as they appeal to the humanity, to 
the health, to the safety, and to the pecuniary 
interest of every person in the city. There was 
a vast interval between Demosthenes and 
O’Connell, but every permanent reform in the 
masses is born from the mottoes of their lives, 
reversed in order. It is agitation repeated and 
repeated again, which compels action similarly 
thorough. 


Church and Theater. 


It is interesting to notice the diversity of 
opinion which men express upon the present 
condition of society. One man gathers up sta¬ 
tistics of the actual facts, and makes a most 
appalling array of figures to show that we are 
living in the most corrupt age of human his¬ 
tory. Another takes a wider view of the field, 
analyzes the forces and circumstances, and 
shows that, on the whole, we are vastly better 
than our fathers. Whatever view we may 
adopt as to that, I think it is clear that if we 
have plunged into lower depths of vice than the 
England of the Restoration, or the France of 
Louis XV., we have developed a power of re¬ 
ligious activity which the world has never 
known. But the true way to estimate the pro¬ 
gress of religious influence is not by the statis¬ 
tics of its individual converts, although to con¬ 
vert the individual is its highest end It might 
be an accelerating power and yet diminish the 



CHURCH AND THEATER. 


143 


number of its disciples in any one generation. 
To estimate it rightly, we must look to its effects 
upon the permanent forces of society, and notice 
where the conflict has left it with respect to 
those warring principles against which it must 
forever stand. Has it crushed any, neutralized 
any, won over any to its side ? 

APPARENT ANTAGONISM. 

From the earliest days of the Christian 
Church the theater has been regarded as one 
of these permanent antagonisms to spirituality. 
The Church and the Stage have raised their 
separate standards and fought out this battle of 
the centuries, with alternate success. Now 
what is the attitude of the religious community 
to-day as to the theater? It is one of wide 
ranging inquiry as to the fundamental ideas of 
of the two opposing forces, and why they are 
opposing. And as the inquiry is pushed deep¬ 
er and deeper through the stratified, hereditary 
animosities, it is becoming evident that, however 
these two principles may differ now, they are not 
antagonistic in their idea, and have a common 
origin in the needs of humanity. We see that 
the Church and the Theater could not have 
been born from antagonistic ideas. 


144 


LECTURES. 


1. Because they were primary forces in 
civilization. 

The faculty of imitation is hereditary in man 
and pantomime precedes speech in his history, 
painting and sculpture, which are action in 
stone or color, are coeval with language and 
gesture as vehicles of thought. 

The most consummate actor in the world is the 
infant, who has desires without a vocabulary 
to express them, and creates the means by his 
own dramatic skill. If any one wants to see pow¬ 
erful acting, let him visit the asylum of the deaf 
and dumb, and he shall see passions depicted 
and knowledge transmitted, and all amid the 
silence of the grave, by the play of muscles and 
organs. So it must have been in the early ages 
of the race, while dialects were developing and 
men depended upon signs and actions to reach 
common understanding. 

2. They cannot be antagonistic in idea, be¬ 
cause the idea of each is to instruct, elevate and 
solace mankind. This needs no developement 
as to the church. But it is undoubtedly true 
as to the theater. As an agent to stir the emo¬ 
tion and suggest action, it is wonderfully potent. 
Coleridge said that to see Kean in Macbeth, 
was to read the play illuminated by flashes of 


CHURCH AND THEATER. 


145 


lightning. It makes all the senses inlets of 
knowledge instead of the eye only. There has 
never been any power on the earth so grand as 
that which Edwards and Massillon wielded from 
their pulpits, which could sway the masses from 
their feet. It is a mightier power than the sa¬ 
cred oil at Rheims can give, and one which is 
the divine right of the King or Ableman, as 
Carlyle says. But it is the province of the ac¬ 
tor to call them back again, and thrill other au¬ 
diences by the reproduction of their oratory. 
Colley Cibber expressed this when he said: 
“ The most a Vandyke can arrive at is to make 
his portraits of great men seem to think. A 
Shakspeare goes further and tells you what his 
pictures thought. A Betterton steps beyond 
both, and calls them from the grave to breathe, 
and be themselves again in feature, speech and 
motion.” He must be a man of strangely sod¬ 
den character, who does not have his conscience 
fired by the remorse of Macbeth, or his better 
sympathies aroused by the stormy sufferings of 
Lear, or his soul broadened by the disgust 
which the Venetian Jew excites. I have seen 
hundreds of strong men wiping from their eyes 
the evidences of their tender-heartedness for 

Irving’s outcast upon the Catskills. 

10 


146 


LECTURES. 


Many a man who saw Ross play George 
Barnwell, was reformed by his influence, and 
it is not too much to say that powerful acting 
may have turned many a man toward the 
church, whom the church never could have 
reached herself. For the ideal power of the 
theater, is in the way in which it carries home 
to the heart of man great moral truths, which 
he knows, but regards as abstract things. It is 
one thing for a man to hear that there is a 
remorse which inevitably follows vice, and 
another thing to see a grand master of tragedy 
pass through the stages of that remorse. 

BOUND TOGETHER. 

3. They can not be antagonistic, because they 
are bound together by material and filial bonds. 
The religious element in man developed and 
matured the drama, and, as we shall see here¬ 
after, has used and handed it down to our own 
day. It is worth noticing that the grandest of 
all dramas that man has ever seen was one where 
God Himself spread out the theater of the uni¬ 
verse, that His servant, Moses, might see repro¬ 
duced the primeval darkness and the flashing 
light, the birthday of earth and sky and sea, the 
beginning and the current of human life, with 


CHURCH AND THEATER. 


147 


its differing acts of love and hate and murder 
and remorse. 

4. They can not be antagonistic, because they 
are each demanded by the instincts of our 
nature. If appetency be sufficient to prove the 
rightfulness of gratification, if divine and infinite 
realities, like God and immortality, are made 
sure to us because we can not otherwise account 
for the soul craving after them, we may reason 
in the same way from the universal desire to en¬ 
joy the drama, to the divine intention that it 
should be gratified. Those who most consci¬ 
entiously abstain from the theater, are often the 
very ones who most desire to go. 

OBJECTION TO THE THEATER OF THE PRESENT. 

II. I have been speaking now of the theater 
in its idea without regard to its condition. But, 
in reply to these reasons why the theater ought 
to be an adjunct to the church, it is urged that, 
as a matter of fact, the influence of the theater 
is bad and antagonistic to the growth of purity 
and religion, and this for several reasons. We 
may group these under one general head, which 
brings up the entire history and present state of 
the stage, and we will consider them together 
with the concessions and extenuations which 


148 


LECTURES. 


are urged in behalf of the theater. It is urged: 

The theater has not been for generations, and 
is not now, true to its idea of instructing the 
moral sense of mankind. It has lost its ethical 
character, and appeals now to the most promi¬ 
nent and yet most basilar human passions — the 
sensual. This, I think, must be admitted to be 
true in regard to the theater in its general con¬ 
dition, however we may doubt it in some cases. 

That type of theatrical performance which is 
most common, and which is at the furthest re¬ 
move alike from ideal drama and Christian 
purity, is the very one which, by its cheapness 
and gaudiness, attracts the ignorant and poorer 
classes. But there is very great force in the 
answer which is made by the managers of our 
theaters to this attack. They tell us that in their 
business, like every other which depends for its 
life upon popular favor, the tone of the drama 
is inevitably determined by the tone of the 
people who frequent it. The great mass of re¬ 
ligious people resolutely abstain from helping 
them. Instead of casting the great weight of 
the religious sentiment of the community in 
favor of a pure and moral and elevating drama, 
they simply withdraw and leave the managers 
nothing to do but lower the performance to the 


CHURCH AND THEATER. 


149 


tone of those who will go. They do not deny 
the facts urged, and, as far as I can see, the 
prominent theater managers throughout the 
country have a sincere regret that they are so, 
and a sincere desire to change them if they can 
be encouraged. When Edwin Forrest was 
speaking on this subject, in New York, in 1846, 
he said: 

“ One of the wishes nearest my heart has ever 
been that our country should one day have 
a drama of her own—a drama that shall have 
for its object the improvement of the heart, the 
refinement of the mind — a drama whose lofty 
and ennobling sentiments shall be worthy of a 
free people, a drama whose eloquent and im¬ 
pressive teachings shall promote the cause of 
virtue and justice, for on such foundations must 
we rely for the perpetuity of our institutions.” 
And only last week one of our most successful 
managers in this city, reviewing the dramatic 
season, tells us that he lost money upon every 
attempt he made to furnish a respectable and un¬ 
objectionable entertainment, and concludes by 
saying, what every man can see is true, that if 
there is no change in this state of things, the 
better theaters will have to stop and leave the 
entire power of the stage with the variety and 
vaudeville halls. 


LECTURES. 


150 


HOW TO REFORM THE THEATER. 

We Christian people ought to notice this. It 
is not a question whether the theaters shall be 
reformed or perish. If it were, there might be 
some reason in leaving them to their doom. But 
it is whether they shall be helped in their en¬ 
deavors to reform, or helped in their downward 
plunge to the low level of an undermining force. 
There never yet was an institution reformed by 
leaving it alone. The only way to recover the 
great power of the stage in the spread of moral 
truth, is by taking hold of it—by saying to those 
who manage it, we will support you in your ef¬ 
forts to clothe it again in its ideal purity, and to 
call it back again from its sleep of death and 
corruption, tearing away its napkins and cere¬ 
ments, and bidding it go forth upon a new and 
bounding life. That is the one and only solu¬ 
tion of this question. The Christian sentiment 
has blindly put the entire drama under its anath¬ 
ema. It has practically made no distinction be¬ 
tween the highest efforts of Booth, and the low¬ 
est ballet performance in a beer hall. It was 
not always so. There was a time, when one of 
the purest-minded Christians who ever tri¬ 
umphed over an abnormally passionate nature 


CHURCH AND THEATER. I 5 I 

gave the drama the power of his support, and 
Samuel Johnson and David Garrick were found 
together in the green-room at Drury Lane. It 
is unfortunate that the religious sentiment as to 
the theater is largely shaped by the tremendous 
philippics of the early Church fathers, and the 
no less tremendous attacks of the Puritans and 
Jeremy Collier in England, while the circum¬ 
stances of those eras are not recalled. We 
think that the drama of to-day is about as bad 
as possible, but the history of the stage is a 
wonderful drama in itself. It first appears as an 
art, with Thespis, who has given it his name, 
and who performed his plays from a wagon, 
some 500 years B. C. Hi)schylus was the father 
of the drama, being, like Shakespeare, both au¬ 
thor and actor. He, and Euripides after him, 
brought the stage in its essentials to what it now 
is. Instead of a single declaimer, who spoke 
the different roles in succession, they introduced 
an actor for each role. Everything that pertains 
to the theater of to-day, was then in use. Be¬ 
fore these great dramatists there had been lewd 
and Bacchanalian ballet plays, and here was the 
first great reform—as great a one as that which 
is demanded to-day. When the force of these 
great men was expiring, Rome swept over the 


T 5 2 


LECTURES. 


earth with her bloody armies, and the taste for 
the arena and gladiatorial shows crushed out the 
last spark of old dramatic art. It was these 
bloody shows upon which Paul looked through 
the bars of his Roman prison. 

WHAT THE FATHERS DENOUNCED. 

When the fathers of the church were so se¬ 
vere in their denunciation of theatrical perform¬ 
ances, it was not only because they were fright¬ 
fully immoral, so much so that the heathens 
themselves were ashamed of them, but because 
they were conducted as religious orgies before 
Bacchus, and were known as his worship. 
When that feature was abolished after Con¬ 
stantine’s conversion, the canons of the church 
no longer forbade attendance upon them, 
although they suggested doubts of the expedi¬ 
ency of so doing. During the middle ages, the 
only theatrical performances were the miracle 
plays and mysteries and interludes given by 
ecclesiastics in churches and convents, and we 
may regard this period as one in which the 
drama was true to its ideal of instructing the 
people in letters, and morals, and religion. Upon 
this era rises the era of Shakespeare, who 
really created the English drama. The first 


CHURCH AND THEATER. 


*53 


theater in England was built during his life, 
and he was the first and the grandest of the 
long line of playwrights among whom, out of 
much that is bad, will shine forever the genius 
of Congreve, Van Brugh, and Sheridan, of 
Corneille, Moliere, and Racine, of De Vega 
and Calderon, of Alfieri, of Lessing, Kotze¬ 
bue, Schiller and Goethe. The most of these 
great men labored for a pure drama. I like 
to think of Goethe and Schiller at Weimar, 
eagerly discussing how the stage might be 
made pure and honorable, and determining that 
the plays should be moral, even if no one came 
to hear them but themselves. In England, the 
mighty genius of Shakespeare had hardly time 
to assert itself before the period of the common¬ 
wealth swept away everything, church festival 
and Church, kingly power and King, playful¬ 
ness and stage plays, before the torrent of Puri¬ 
tan austerity. When the reaction came at the 
Restoration, the stage, like every other suddenly 
freed force, became uncontrollable in its wild¬ 
ness and licentiousness. In our day, we can’t 
conceive the depravity which was universal 
then. Then Jeremy Collier stood up and spoke 
in words that echo to our day in behalf of a 
purer and better stage, and Macauley says he 


154 


LECTURES. 


effected so much that “ a new race of wits 
arose, who treated with reverence the quality 
which binds society together, and whose very in¬ 
decencies were decent when compared with those 
of the last forty years of the seventeenth cen¬ 
tury.” Since that time, to our day, the drama 
has been alternately falling and rising, and we 
are set to solve the same problem as the gener¬ 
ations that are gone. “ How shall we raise up 
this fallen giant without being crushed by his 
weight.” 

THE TWO POWERS. 

Here stand the two powers, the Church and 
the Theater. In the Church are gathered the 
intelligence, the wealth, the moral sentiment of 
society. What she wants is to reach the vast 
laboring element, and all over the country she 
is discussing that question, how to fill her 
buildings with the ignorant and the poor. The 
theater, crowded with this very element from 
pit to gallery, is earnestly asking how it can se¬ 
cure the help and support of that part of the 
community which is found in the church, 
which promises permanence and the hope of 
something better for the stage’s future. The 
only hope that the church can ever plant her¬ 
self firmly in the sympathies and hearts of the 


CHURCH AND THEATER. 


r 55 


toiling millions, is that she can first reach them, 
and where can she ever reach them except as 
she creates a common standing ground for them 
and herself in the amusements which they crave 
and she sanctifies. There is no antipathy in the 
heart of any man to the sacred influence of the 
man of Nazareth. The men who shall gather 
to-night, even before the footlights of our lowest 
dens are men who once slept upon a mother’s 
breast: are men who have organs, dimensions, 
senses, affections, passions, as a Christian hath. 

Let it be the church’s work first to pro¬ 
vide amusements for these men, to encourage 
those whose business it is to furnish amuse¬ 
ments, to see that in the place of that which 
now poisons them and society, they shall have 
opportunities to attend better plays for the same 
money—make these men rise to higher levels 
by seeing how splendid are their natures, and 
what vast ambitions and potencies Shakspeare 
found and sung in just such men as they are. 
When once they learn that religion is not a 
hard and cruel stepmother, who will fill their 
lives with misery, and take from them what little 
pleasure they can cudgel out of life between 
sundown and bedtime, but that she is really 
their mother, seeking nothing so much as means 


LECTURES. 


156 

to improve and elevate and cheer them in this 
life as well as the world to come. Then will 
many voices rise inquiring for that religion 
which is throwing sunlight upon stony roads, 
and that old story of the cross, breathed sub- 
tlely through the joys of men, shall not be 
forgotten in its faintest echo in their sins and 
sorrows. 

A REVOLUTION IN THE DRAMA. 

I preach to no man to violate the dictates of 
his conscience, but I ask if it is not in the hands 
of the religious people of to-day to create a 
revolution in the drama by emphasizing its ap¬ 
proval of the good, and continuing and redoub¬ 
ling its warfare upon the bad. Do you say the 
actors are so bad? Many of them are grand 
men in all the emotions that underlie the Chris¬ 
tian virtues, and it is a narrowness of mind 
which, because of their profession, writes them 
all down at once as greater sinners than others. 
Music has not always refined its followers, and 
Poetry, which can make an ideal world for man 
to breathe in, has numbered among its sweetest 
singers many a Byron and a Poe. 

The theater is not so bad but that it may be 
reformed—is not so bad as it has been, and yet 
been reformed. We have wonderful encour- 


CHURCH AND THEATER. 


x 57 


agements to believe in its future for good. The 
immortal productions which shall last like ada¬ 
mant are noble and soul-inspiring. Those which 
are impure and bad have death written on them 
in their cradle. Those plays which any man or 
woman may look upon to-day, and rise the bet¬ 
ter for having seen them, are the same ones 
which, in the years that are gone, made our an¬ 
cestors tremble or laugh when Garrick or Foote, 
or Betterton or Kean, or Booth or Forrest, were 
the actors. And they are the same plays which, 
presented by a long line of dramatic kings, shall 
thrill generations yet unborn. The desire of 
managers and actors already is, as might be 
supposed, to give a pure and reformed drama. 
The religious sentiment, which might be so po¬ 
tential, is neutralizing itself by persisting in its 
generic condemnation, while its people are in¬ 
dividually making their own election in the 
matter. The Church never yet has made such 
grand progress as she will make when she learns 
to discriminate wisely between the amusements 
which kill and those which recreate, and under¬ 
stands the depth, and height, and length and 
breadth of that saying of the Apostle, that the 
first “ fruit of the spirit is joy.” I feel deeply 
the outrage of that long tradition that the Gospel 


LECTURES. 


158 

of Jesus Christ cannot fit men for another life 
without unfitting them for this one. It has the 
promise of this life as well as the one to come, 
and he sees but a sorry corner of it, who thinks 
it ought to freeze up the emotions and joys of 
his soul. We are grown wiser in this regard. 
The Puritanism of to-day is the ungodly liber¬ 
alism of two centuries ago. 

“Through the ages one increasing purpose runs, 

And the thoughts of man are widened 
With the process of the suns.” 

THEATER REFORM ASSOCIATIONS. 

There are “ Theater Reform Associations ” 
both in the English Church and our own, headed 
by large-minded and broad-sympathied men. 
And when the Bishop of Manchester spoke on 
this theme from a theater stage some months 
ago, he was listened to by thousands who bid 
him God-speed. If we are to reform the stage, 
and it be worth reforming, we must go down to 
it, and foster its own inherent principles of good. 
It can never be done by preaching at it as a foul 
and leprous thing. I wonder if the Master 
meant to teach His Church a great principle 
when, instead of remaining apart and speaking 
the word, He went out and laid His hand upon 
the leper’s pestilential body? Whether He 


CHURCH AND THEATER. 159 

meant that the noblest of her powers was to 
seek the diseased and death-creating forces 
about her, and by the divinity of her touch and 
the sympathy of her love gain them back again 
in purity and cleanliness. 

PRACTICABLE MODES OF REFORM. 

It is too early yet to suggest the different 
modes of reform which are possible, but there 
are some which seem practicable, and which 
have worked well in other cases. 

First—There is the great power of religious 
sentiment which ought to sustain, by personal 
support, all that is pure and good in the present 
drama. There are many plays which need not 
icall a blush upon the purest maiden’s cheek. 
But let no one mistake me. To your own con¬ 
science you stand or fall, and if it be true, as it 
may be, among the varying temptations of vary¬ 
ing natures, that the theater rubs off the enamel 
of your spirituality, then you are not called to 
this work. 

Second—The Church can begin to supply the 
poorer regions of the city with cheap and moral 
entertainments which shall break up the fearful 
dens of vice which now gather them in. She 
has already put her temperance eating houses 


i6o 


LECTURES. 


and reading rooms beside the dram-shops. Let 
her create a clean, instructive and entertaining 
theater, and see that it is preserved so, and a 
dozen miasmatic ones will droop and die. Men 
want amusement, but, other things being equal, 
they want the good and pure, where they can 
take their families with them. 

There are many suggestions which will arise 
when the work is really begun, but it is very 
certain that the same personal and continual 
labor and expense which are used in the hun¬ 
dreds of prayer-meetings in the city, where none 
go but those who manage them, might, in a 
year, do much to reform the theaters. 

It will not do to say there is no necessity to 
act. One of the most beautiful of earthly tem¬ 
ples, venerable with age, worn by the footsteps 
of many generations, crowded with the slum¬ 
bering echoes of the sighs and joys of our an¬ 
cestors, has become an iniquitous den. Let the 
church, like her Master, enter the polluted place, 
not to destroy, but to cleanse. And we may see 
from this temple of the sanctified pleasures of 
man, what Ezekiel saw from another temple— 
fresh waters flowing downward to a desert, and 
making everything green where its current 


comes. 


Common Sense in Funerals. 


We live in an age of rapidly multiplying 
facilities. Everything necessary to life is far 
cheaper than ever before. Reforms have fol¬ 
lowed each other so rapidly, that men of very 
small means can live decently and comfortably, 
and keep out of debt. No man is called upon 
by a false sentiment to live beyond his means, 
unless it be his own false sentiment of pride. 

All the expenses of his family living he may 
arrange to suit himself, and he will find thou¬ 
sands living on the same scale. But when he 
is called upon to bury any of his family, he 
finds no longer the same choice. He is shut 
up by social custom to an expense and display 
of his grief, which shock him. I do not hesi¬ 
tate to say that in this matter of burying the 
dead, we, the most civilized people of the earth, 
are far behind the people of two thousand years 
ago. It is a subject calling vociferously for re¬ 
form, and that cry must be heard in the Church, 
u 



162 


LECTURES. 


to which the care of funerals has been entirely 
delegated. It is astonishing how powerfully 
habit forms and crystalizes about society. A 
man goes to the funeral of some simple-minded, 
unostentatious man who has lived with him 
quietly and economically, for thirty years. He 
knows that he disliked all display, was retiring 
and modest in his character, and wanted to be 
known for what he was, not for what he had. 
His friend notices the elaborate funeral, with its 
great display and cost, goes home, and wonders 
that people can be so extravagant and so for¬ 
getful of the habits and disposition of the de¬ 
parted; inveighs against funerals as they are 
now conducted, and when he loses a member 
of his family, unhesitatingly and as he thinks 
generously, says to some friend, “ See that every¬ 
thing is done in the ver}^ best manner,” and 
another link is riveted to the chain of custom. 

Men are afraid of censure, if they break 
through this ordinary extravagance. Men who 
have been remarkable for their affection and 
love, and who are well known to be heart¬ 
broken at their great loss, are yet afraid to do 
what decency, and common sense, and due re¬ 
gard for the living dependents upon them de¬ 
mand, because some one will say, they lacked 


COMMON SENSE IN FUNERALS. 


163 


affection. What an absurd thing it is that men 
should involve themselves in debt because an 
undertaker tells them that less expense would 
be remarked upon. What an astonishing thing 
that men who are brave enough to stand up 
against the demands of an artificial society in 
everything else, do not care a particle what 
people say of their manner of life, so long as 
they themselves know it to be an honest and 
sensible way, cannot resist the most preposter¬ 
ous of all its artificial demands when it clamors 
for obedience to its funeral customs. Of course 
the rich do not feel this outrage as do the poor 
and middle classes. But unfortunately, there 
are far more poor people to follow, than there 
are rich people to set the fashion 5 and upon 
them this matter of burying their dead has be¬ 
come a grievous hardship, and must be reformed. 
The only way to reform it is to show the unrea¬ 
sonableness of it, and to inspire some one to be¬ 
gin a new and decent habit, which shall gather 
about it the strange power of a precedent. 

If in Cincinnati a half-dozen men, known for 
prudence and common sense, were to proclaim 
that they knew how to show decent respect for 
their dead without indecent disregard of the 
living, the whole system at present in use, built 


LECTURES. 


164 

on shadowy necessities, would roll itself up and 
disappear. What is it that every man feels to 
be the object of a burial ceremony? It is sim¬ 
ply this, to reverently and sorrowfully lay the 
body in the ground. Stripped of all ulterior 
thoughts, that is the ideal funeral which accom¬ 
plishes this object with least grating upon the 
mourner’s sensibilities, and with most simplicity 
impresses upon the living, the lesson of mor¬ 
tality. Compare the accounts of the burial of 
John the Baptist, of Jesus, of Ananias, of Dor¬ 
cas, mentioned in the New Testament, with an 
an account of a modern funeral, and how vastly 
superior in every respect is the ancient sim¬ 
plicity ! 

If the Apostolic College had been compelled 
to bury James, their Chief Bishop, as men are 
buried now, it would have compelled St. Paul 
to make another missionary tour soliciting alms 
for the Church in Jerusalem. 

The burial of our Lord is described in the 
Scriptures as a costly one. Pie made His grave 
with the rich, and was embalmed with frankin¬ 
cense and myrrh. And yet, it was so simple 
and inexpensive that a few poor women accom¬ 
plished it between 3 o’clock and 6 o’clock in 
the afternoon. 


COMMON SENSE IN FUNERALS. 1 65 

The first reform, then, which is needed is in 
the matter of expense. 

Funerals cost too much. Few people know 
how much they do cost. But it is a fact that it 
takes $50 to buy the lowest-priced coffin which 
is furnished. No one is willing to have a plain 
pine box for his friend, and he won’t find any¬ 
thing else, less than $50. From that price he 
can go up to almost anything he wants—one, 
two, four, six hundred dollars. Now, a rich 
man can pay $100 for a coffin without any 
trouble, perhaps, but consider it when it is the 
the case of a man getting a salary, say of 
$1,200 a year. It takes a month’s steady labor 
to pay for that one item alone. Then there are 
the carriages for the family, and for the friends 
who show their sympathy by going to the cem¬ 
etery. One, two, three, ten, fifty carriages must 
be paid for, besides the hearse. Then there is 
the expense of the grave and digging it, the 
expense for personal supervision of the under¬ 
taker, the gloves and crape, the flowers, the 
suits of mourning and the tombstone. Thank 
God, it has not gone so far yet as to add a min¬ 
ister’s fee to this long list of items. It is an 
appalling thing that we cannot bury a friend 
without this great expense. And it troubles 


166 


LECTURES. 


one even amid the solemn moments of the ser¬ 
vice, to think how long the embarrassments of 
the clay’s outlay will be felt. I have had to con¬ 
duct funerals in stately houses, where the mas¬ 
ter has died and must be buried in accordance 
with the way in which he lived. So there were 
the magnificent casket, whose cost would sup¬ 
port a family for a year; the rare flowers, filling 
every vase and standing in emblems every¬ 
where; the street filled with hired carriages; 
the mourning friends, clothed in elegant and ex¬ 
pensive dresses, and the rooms filled with friends 
who knew perfectly well that when the will was 
opened and the estate inventoried, it would be 
found there was not enough to pay the cost. 
Ask the undertakers, and they will tell you that 
they hold long-unpaid accounts against honest 
families, who have to scrimp and save for months 
and years to pay the useless expenses of a fash¬ 
ionable funeral. Ask them again, and they 
will tell you they have to execute lavish orders 
by persons who they feel certain can never pay 
the cost of them, and never do pay it. It makes 
men dishonest over the very grave of the one 
they love, because they must bury him decently 
and have no means to do it. A poor man died 
in the city without a dollar; his wife, a good, 


COMMON SENSE IN FUNERALS. 1 67 

pious, Christian woman, represented the case to 
me that she had to assume the obligation and 
sign a paper binding herself to pay the cost of 
his funeral. The cost was $45. She had worked 
month after month sewing as she could, and 
feeding and supporting three children, and still 
owed much of it. Here is where this system 
is so bad—here is where it grinds and touches 
the nerves. It is the poor people who are com¬ 
pelled to follow the ways of the rich, and can¬ 
not bury their dead without being beggars or 
insolvent debtors, who most piteously ask for 
relief. I am well aware of the answer that 
will be made. If a man is able, may he not 
bury his dead with as much expense as he 
chooses? May his affection not provide every¬ 
thing that tells of the loss he deplores? Go out 
into Spring Grove and hear the question an¬ 
swered. While the casket is lowered into the 
earth where it must decay whether it be metal 
or wood, there passes another funeral. The 
two graves are open, and that place which really 
obliterates all human distinctions between rich 
and poor when dead, most strongly emphasizes 
those distinctions when living. 

The eye that looks upon human interests sees 
what ? Two bodies asleep side by side,one in satin 


i68 


LECTURES. 


and rosewood and the other in plain deal board; 
that in the silent city, and in the busy, living 
city, he sees the two families that are left, and 
one of them starving for food which the decay¬ 
ing rosewood might have given for months. 
While there are so many poor, let men show 
their love for the dead by spending money for 
them on those who live and feel. “ Would 
you honor the dead,” asked Chrysostom, “ give 
alms.” In the early days of Christianity, al¬ 
though the Church followed the heathen nations 
in using coffins, rather than the Jews, who used 
none, yet the expense was small. The excep¬ 
tions to this rule were severely rebuked, and not 
allowed to grow into precedents. Constantine 
had a coffin covered with gold and an imperial 
purple pall. When the daughter of Paula was 
buried in the same extravagant manner, the 
powerful voice of Jerome rose in disgusted 
censure. I seem to hear Christ crying from 
heavei^ “ I own not this covering; this orna¬ 
ment is the ornament of strangers.” Instead of 
this useless expenditure, this burial of wealth, 
there grew up the custom of distributing alms 
to the poor, after the funeral, and on each anni¬ 
versary of it. “ If they were to commemorate 
a child or brother that was dead,” says Chry- 


COMMON SENSE IN FUNERALS. 


169 


sostom again, “ they were pricked in conscience 
if they did not fulfil the custom and call the 
poor and feed them.” This is a far higher me¬ 
morial of the dead than all the ornaments on a 
perishing coffin. But irrespective of this alter¬ 
native use of the same money, it is certain that 
there must be a reform in the expense of burials, 
and this is the first item in this indictment of a 
bad custom. 

2. Again, in the matter of mourning there 
must come a reform born of the good sense of 
the people. The deep and silent anguish that 
every funeral causes in some heart is a personal 
and sacred feeling. Christianity recognizes the 
weakness of human sensibilities, and enjoins 
and sympathizes with the deep sorrow of a sev¬ 
ered and bleeding life. And of that sorrow, in 
all ages, there has been some external symbol. 
In the earliest days, the rending of the clothes 
and the mourning sackcloth were the symbol. 
But if any one asks how the modern custom of 
mourning has grown up, he will find it one of 
the most cheerless of all habits. It is strange 
that the nations whose pure faith best illuminates 
the future, are the ones that bear the saddest 
and most desolate symbols of death. There is 
nothing in the nature of black crape that makes 


170 


LECTURES. 


it a funeral emblem, or an expression of resigned 
Christian hope and patience. We have taken 
the mourning color of the old Roman Empire, 
but even there the women wore white for mourn¬ 
ing. In Turkey, the color is violet; in China, 
white; in Egypt, yellow; in Ethiopia, brown. 
And it ought to be borne in mind, too, that the 
original idea and common sense view of mourn¬ 
ing, was that it should be only worn for a few 
days. The royal courts keep the original cus¬ 
tom when they go into mourning for thirty days 
or some period for a prince of the blood. The 
Jews mourned seven days, and then laid aside 
the external emblem. The Greeks mourned 
thirty days. Mourning habits came into use 
early in the Church, and were not censured or 
encouraged by the great bishops. Jerome com¬ 
mends Julian, a rich Roman, because he wore 
mourning but forty days after he had lost wife 
and two daughters. Cyprian preached bitterly 
against those who by their constant garb seemed 
to lament deceased friends, as though they were 
extinct . Chrysostom, speaking of the same 
people, says: “Men say, Are these the men 
who talk so finely about the resurrection? Yes, 
indeed. But their actions do not agree with 
their words, for while they profess in their doc- 


COMMON SENSE IN FUNERALS. 171 

trine, belief in the resurrection, in their deeds 
they act more like men who despair of it. If 
they were really sure their dead were gone to a 
better life they would not do so. Therefore,” 
says Chrysostom, “let us not so mourn for 
them.” Our present habits of mourning do not 
show forth our faith. I do not doubt in many 
cases it would be very painful to the stricken 
person to appear again in bright colors, but this 
is the result of mistaken, general education. 
It is not based upon the wider truth that our 
business here is not to perpetuate sorrow and 
gloom, but to make our light shine among men, 
to be cheerful and inspiring, to seek society and 
make evident to men that true religion drives 
out fear and gloom and hopeless sorrow. The 
Chinese have a custom of closing up the room 
in which death takes place. Room after room 
is sealed up till the entire house is deserted. I 
am in hopes the time will come when we can 
so far triumph over our personal feelings as to 
relieve society from the funeral colors which 
custom has made obligatory, and to preserve 
the memory of our dear ones in our secret life. 

3. There are many little things which are 
customary now, which are not reasonable, and 
ought to be changed in the methods of con- 


172 


LECTURES. 


ducting funerals. As a matter of general con¬ 
venience all funerals ought to be from the 
church. There, all are alike. Those who 
have small houses and those who have large 
ones come alike into the house of God, and the 
solemn service is especially solemn when font 
and coffin stand together. It brings men into 
church under the most favorable circumstances 
for impressing truth upon them. 

Out of all the different businesses of life men 
are compelled to step aside for a moment into 
the silence of the church to hear its office for 
the dead, and in many cases that impression of 
religious fervor and beauty is the first and most 
enduring in the life. But then let it be the pub¬ 
lic office, let it not be the place for display of 
private emotions and relationships. The curi¬ 
osity which too often seizes a great multitude, 
to look upon the features of the dead in the 
house of God, desecrates it as well as humanity, 
which is a temple for finer instincts and feelings. 
The coffin should never be opened there, and 
there ought never in any audience to be heard 
that common invitation to come forward and 
look at the features. The family alone, and by 
themselves, should take their last farewell, and 
upon that scene, the most sacred and least con- 


COMMON SENSE IN FUNERALS. 173 

ventional in all our lives, there should be no 
lookers-on. Many a time during the war I have 
seen mother and son left alone while she bid him 
farewell as he went away where death was 
raging. The fine sensibilities of humanity taught 
rough men that they should not be spectators of 
that scene. Much more would it seem proper 
that the final farewell between the living and 
the dead should be a sacred and confidential 
matter between them alone. And it is only a 
prolongation of the same thought which de¬ 
mands private burials. By the riven earth in 
which the body is to lie, there should stand the 
family and friends only. In country and vil¬ 
lages, where the procession can move from 
church to cemetery on foot, carrying the bier 
with them on willing shoulders, it is beautiful 
to see the sympathy of many friends. But in 
the cities, where men are compelled to carry 
the dead so far, everything is favorable to the 
public service in the church and the private in¬ 
terment later. It is a custom which I am glad 
to see is growing. 

As to the funeral discourse, as an Episcopal 
clergyman I perhaps should not speak so long, 
as it has been an immemorial custom with us to 
leave the event to preach its own sermon. But 


174 


LECTURES. 


I am glad to see that the custom of funeral dis¬ 
courses is gradually going out, as the Episcopal 
burial office is gradually coming into general use. 

After one has read the sublime chapter by St. 
Paul, there is not much left to say upon the hope 
of immortality, and after the anthems, there is 
not much can be said to deepen the impression 
of the shortness and uncertainty of human life. 
No composition of man requires so many gifts 
as a funeral discourse, and if it be not very 
good, it is exceedingly bad. I have heard many 
of these discourses, and, at the urgent request 
of the family, have made some, but of them all 
I never heard or made one that did not partially 
destroy the sublimer effect of the sermon 
preached by the prayer-book, and by the awful 
sincerity of the coffin. 

I have spoken upon this subject to-day be¬ 
cause my experience teaches me it is one of 
great importance and must be considered. I do 
not expect to see a change made at once, but I 
ask you to consider what I have said, whether 
it be not reasonable, and whether we may not 
well, strive to impress it upon society. 




































































































4 































■ 
































































































































































